R – Optimizing performance on Erlang processes

Several tips:

1. Put inserts/updates in a transaction.
2. For older versions of SQLite - Consider a less paranoid journal mode (pragma journal_mode). There is NORMAL, and then there is OFF, which can significantly increase insert speed if you're not too worried about the database possibly getting corrupted if the OS crashes. If your application crashes the data should be fine. Note that in newer versions, the OFF/MEMORY settings are not safe for application level crashes.
3. Playing with page sizes makes a difference as well (PRAGMA page_size). Having larger page sizes can make reads and writes go a bit faster as larger pages are held in memory. Note that more memory will be used for your database.
4. If you have indices, consider calling CREATE INDEX after doing all your inserts. This is significantly faster than creating the index and then doing your inserts.
5. You have to be quite careful if you have concurrent access to SQLite, as the whole database is locked when writes are done, and although multiple readers are possible, writes will be locked out. This has been improved somewhat with the addition of a WAL in newer SQLite versions.
6. Take advantage of saving space...smaller databases go faster. For instance, if you have key value pairs, try making the key an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY if possible, which will replace the implied unique row number column in the table.
7. If you are using multiple threads, you can try using the shared page cache, which will allow loaded pages to be shared between threads, which can avoid expensive I/O calls.
8. Don't use !feof(file)!

I've also asked similar questions here and here.

In your original code, you only started one MailboxProcessor. Make wait() a function, and call it with each yield. Also you are not waiting for them to spin up or receive the messages, which I think invalidates the timing info; see my code below.

That said, I have some success; on my box I can do 100,000 at about 25us each. After too much more, I think possibly you start fighting the allocator/GC as much as anything, but I was able to do a million too (at about 27us each, but at this point was using like 1.5G of memory).

Basically each 'suspended async' (which is the state when a mailbox is waiting on a line like

let! msg = inbox.Receive()

) only takes some number of bytes while it's blocked. That's why you can have way, way, way more asyncs than threads; a thread typically takes like a megabyte of memory or more.

Ok, here's the code I'm using. You can use a small number like 10, and --define DEBUG to ensure the program semantics are what is desired (printf outputs may be interleaved, but you'll get the idea).

open System.Diagnostics 

let MAX = 100000

type waitMsg = 
    | Die 

let mutable countDown = MAX
let mre = new System.Threading.ManualResetEvent(false)

let wait(i) = 
    MailboxProcessor.Start(fun inbox -> 
        let rec loop = 
            async { 
#if DEBUG
                printfn "I am mbox #%d" i
#endif                
                if System.Threading.Interlocked.Decrement(&countDown) = 0 then
                    mre.Set() |> ignore
                let! msg = inbox.Receive() 
                match msg with  
                | Die -> 
#if DEBUG
                    printfn "mbox #%d died" i
#endif                
                    if System.Threading.Interlocked.Decrement(&countDown) = 0 then
                        mre.Set() |> ignore
                    return() } 
        loop) 

let max N = 
    printfn "Started!" 
    let stopwatch = new Stopwatch() 
    stopwatch.Start() 
    let actors = [for i in 1 .. N do yield wait(i)] 
    mre.WaitOne() |> ignore // ensure they have all spun up
    mre.Reset() |> ignore
    countDown <- MAX
    for actor in actors do 
        actor.Post(Die) 
    mre.WaitOne() |> ignore // ensure they have all got the message
    stopwatch.Stop() 
    printfn "Process spawn time=%f microseconds." (stopwatch.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds * 1000.0 / float(N)) 
    printfn "Done." 

max MAX

All this said, I don't know Erlang, and I have not thought deeply about whether there's a way to trim down the F# any more (though it's pretty idiomatic as-is).