[erlang-questions] gen_fsm and active sockets

[Dave Smith]

Greetings,

I'm using gen_fsm to manage a socket connection, and have a question
about how one SHOULD use gen_fsm for this purpose. I'm specifically
using the "active" mode for the socket, so I'm currently receiving
events via the handle_info/3 callback. I understand why the socket
events arrive there, but I wonder what the best way to pass the event
along to the actual FSM is. I see there being 3 possible options:

1. Receive socket events on a dedicated process and pass events into
gen_fsm via that process. Upside is that this provides nice separation
of socket and fsm logic. Downside there is that I'm doubling the
number of processes -- i.e. i had one process per socket, now I have
two. That's not a big problem with a couple of thousand connections,
but once I'm in the 20k-30k connections realm, I'm not quite sure what
the implications of doubling the number of processes is. Is it
"normal" in a production system to run 100k+ processes? Note: I'm
still recovering from pthreads land, where 100k+ theads is a scary,
scary thing -- so maybe this concern over # of processes is a
threading world "hangover" :)

2. Receive socket events in handle_info and invoke
gen_fsm:send_event() from there. This seems like the "obvious"
approach, but it feels wrong -- I'm already in process and don't
really want to queue up another event. Again, possibly a "hangover"
from non-Erlang land.

3. Receive socket events in handle_info, then do a
?MODULE:StateName({socket_event ...}, State). Avoids (perceived)
overhead of approach #3, but...is this a good idea?!

Hopefully this isn't a stupid/obvious question -- I'm finding that
erlang has a tendency to turn "common sense" on its head (in a good
way). Any guidance from the gurus would be happily accepted.. :)

D.