March 28, 2026•1 min read•from InfoQ

Discord Engineers Add Distributed Tracing to Elixir's Actor Model Without Performance Penalty

Discord engineering detailed how they added distributed tracing to Elixir's actor model. Their custom Transport library wraps messages with trace context and uses dynamic sampling to handle million-user fanouts. CPU optimizations included skipping unsampled traces and filtering context before deserialization, recovering 10+ percentage points of overhead.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

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