Design phase in Erlang

[Vance Shipley]

}  http://www.sics.se/~joe/ericsson/du98024.html

Just for fun I tried out this test on an UltraSparc 5 running
Solaris 8 and R9B-0.  I found that it started paging at about
70K processes with 256MB of memory so I upgraded it to 512MB
and found I could go to 180K processes before it paged.

$ erl +P 262144 +A 32 
Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.2 [64-bit] [source] [threads:32]

21> zog:start(180000).
<0.23949.6>
Setup : 5.17900 s (28.7724 us per spawn) (179999 spawns)
Run   : 6.12400 s (5.67038 us per msg) (1079999 msgs)

This is pretty is impressive!  What I found interesting are the 
results of running the same tests using the shared heap emulator:

                Non-shared Heap          Shared Heap
                (in micro secs)       (in micro secs)
               -----------------      -----------------
Processes      Spawn     Message      Spawn     Message
---------      -------  --------      ------   --------
       10                    2.3                    2.1
      100                    2.7        20.2        2.5
     1000         29.0       2.8        29.0        2.8
    10000         32.7       5.2        26.6        6.2
    20000         31.0       5.2        27.2       10.4
    30000         29.9       5.2        28.3       10.4
    40000         29.4       5.3        29.3       26.8
    50000         28.9       5.4        28.8       38.8
    60000         28.6       5.4        38.0       10.4
    70000         29.3       5.4        36.6       38.9
    80000         29.3       5.3        35.7       26.9
    90000         29.3       5.5        38.0        9.8
   100000         29.0       5.6        33.5      134.6
   110000         29.0       5.6        33.4      134.6
   120000         29.1       5.6        33.3       89.6
   130000         28.1       5.4        41.7       27.0
   140000         28.6       5.8        40.8      188.2
   150000         28.5       5.5        40.0       39.0
   160000         28.5       5.8        39.3      188.2
   170000         28.7       5.3        38.7  *    13.7
   180000         28.8       5.7        42.3  *   121.4
   190000         43.3  *   86.7       579.4  *   328.1
   200000         42.7  *  233.1          

  [*] paging