alt Hacker NewsI run a large on-prem temporal setup - throwaway acct as they will likely out me.
Temporal is, in my opinion having run it in prod for over a year - poorly designed, slow and ridicliously heavy infra wise.
If you're doing anything non-trivial (say, 200+ events/workflow) and you need to run only a couple hundred of them concurrently all day, you're going to spend millions on infra, and it's still going to absolutely suck.
Try running their own benchmarks, the numbers are pathetic.
Their sales team is also absolutely appalling and desperate.
From a Developer standpoint, the SDK is quite nice though.
Don't get trapped into nexus, and if the sales team call you make sure legal is in the room.
Replies
Since I'm in a ranting mode -- here's a good example: you're limited to _ONE_ IO per shard in the history service:
https://github.com/temporalio/temporal/blob/e22e6304b3c4a409...
https://github.com/temporalio/temporal/blob/e22e6304b3c4a409...
Temporal does a crazy amount of database operations and all of these are behind that mutex.
Oh, and you can't change the shard count on existing clusters.
Great stuff.
> If you're doing anything non-trivial (say, 200+ events/workflow) and you need to run only a couple hundred of them concurrently all day, you're going to spend millions on infra, and it's still going to absolutely suck.
Where are the “millions” on infra going? It’s a handful of services and a Postgres?
> Their sales team is also absolutely appalling and desperate.
You said “on-prem”. It’s open source; why are you dealing with their sales team?
> If you're doing anything non-trivial (say, 200+ events/workflow) and you need to run only a couple hundred of them concurrently all day…
If “millions” were required to obtain such tiny scale, I’d agree there’d be a massive problem. No one would use Temporal; it would be a complete waste of resource. If this were true.
Agree. Have worked in a codebase using Temporal, and is pretty much a nightmare. I don't know about the infra side, but from the developer side, all the abstractions they bring to the table are poorly designed. Wouldn't recommend
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Honest question: Can you use Temporal Cloud? Have you evaluated Temporal Cloud pricing?
Ballparking: 200 events/workflow, 200 workflows/per day and assuming 1 event = 1 cloud action[1], that is 1.2M or so actions per month. The $100/month plan includes 1M actions each month, and even the pay-as-you pricing when you exceed that is $50 per 1M actions[2].
Temporal Cloud seems extremely cheap for your use case, even if I'm off by a factor of 10. Is there a catch? You still need infra to run your Temporal workers, and I assume there are storage and other costs, but I assume action usage is the majority of it.
1. Not sure exactly what constitutes an "Action". At a glance, seems like most events have a corresponding action(?) and a subset of those actions are actually billable(?)
2. https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/pricing#payg-action-pricing