[erlang-questions] hybrid heap question

[Richard Carlsson]

Yariv Sadan wrote:
> Is there any reason not to use 'erl -hybrid'? Also, has anyone
> measured the performance difference it gives to some application that
> relies on message passing?

The usual answer to this kind of question is "it varies with the
application", but in general I think there are more advantages
than disadvantages. For mind-numbing detail, see:
   http://user.it.uu.se/~richardc/papers/msganalysis.pdf
(Look towards the end of the paper for measurements and nice
colourful pictures, including some in the appendix.)

> Side note: I suspect that using a hybrid heap would improve the
> performance of applications that use the MySQL and/or Postgres drivers
> as the database queries and result sets wouldn't have to be copied
> when sent between processes. What do you think?

It depends on whether or not the analysis can deduce that the data
will become part of a message. At any rate, it should remove _some_
of the copying.

     /Richard