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[Martin J. Logan]

Hello,
    I have a question about atoms. I realize that it is not a good idea to use
list_to_atom to create atoms dynamically. I have a situation in which I need to
communicate with a spawned process on a remote node. I can have thousands of
these processes.  The  knee jerk solution that I came up with was to locally
register each spawned process and then send across the net its registered name
and node. The receiving process can then {name, node} ! message  the remote
process. Are atoms ever cleaned up? I thought that when a process dies that all
atoms associated with it would be destroyed. I am getting atom_tab filled
errors. Does anyone know how the atom table is dealt with and if atoms are
around for the life of the node could someone suggest a good solution for
talking to these individual processes across nodes?

            Thanks,
            Martin