Rebranding distributed Erlang

[Mickael Remond]

On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:01:43 +0200 (CEST), Joe Armstrong <joe@REDACTED>  
wrote:

>   BTW  - what  are the  upper bounds  on a  the number  of nodes  in a
> distributed Erlang  system? - If we  assume that joins  and leaves are
> rare and that nodes are on-line  for long periods is it unrealistic to
> have  a DE  system with  thousands/millions of  nodes? -  what  is the
> limiting factor? - what breaks as the system gets large?

As I understand it, you are most of the time supposed to have connections  
between all nodes of the Erlang cluster. A node in your Erlang cluster is  
typically connected with all other nodes in the cluster. So, I do not not  
the limit here, but I assume it is quite low (regarding the usual scale of  
a P2P network). You can partition your Erlang cluster network and have  
nodes only linked to some of the Erlang cluster nodes, but they are thus  
not aware of the nodes they are not linked to and there is no standard way  
to route messages from one node to a node I am not linked to. You need to  
code something on top of the Erlang protocol to handle routing.

The current Erlang internode protocol is not yet made for P2P  
applications. To handle that you need adequate routing algorithms to be  
able to create a huge Erlang cluster without the need to connect all nodes  
with all the other, as this does not scale well.

I hope i did not misunderstood something in the way the Erlang internode  
protocol is running.

But adding P2P support at the level of the Erlang internode communication  
could be a good idea, to make Erlang clusters more scalable and to ease  
the development of P2P applications.

-- 
Mickaël Rémond
  http://www.erlang-projects.org/