[erlang-questions] Re: How to make the Erlang VM predictible when spawning processes?

[Nicholas Frechette]

Having pre-spawned processes doesn't mean you have to reuse them.
You could just spawn them ahead of time, say 1000 of them, let them
terminate as normal. Once you request a process to give it a task and you
notice that you've passed a threshold, say, < 500 free processes left, you
can spawn a process that forks 1000 more and adds them to the pool of
waiting ones. Example numbers of course but with a setup like this, it might
work good enough.

Or, alternatively, once a process has done it's job, instead of simply
terminating, spawn a new one and add it to the free pool. That way the
number of pre-spawned processes should be more constant and the performance
hit of spawning shouldn't matter that much as you are done with your (main)
work.

Nicholas

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Ovidiu Deac <ovidiudeac@REDACTED> wrote:

> If I only have transient processes I can avoid the garbage collection
> by setting the initial heap to a value which is big enough for the
> process. If I reuse the processes I can't make this optimization.
>
> This is why I was thinking that reusing processes is not good.
>
> On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Jesper Louis Andersen
> <jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Ovidiu Deac <ovidiudeac@REDACTED>
> wrote:
> >> I was hoping that the latency introduced by the OS would be lower and
> >> we would have enough time to satisfy the 10ms requirement. If you are
> >> right then I guess 10ms response time is not realistic on a standard
> >> system.
> >
> > Shooting partially in the dark here. But what if you had a small set
> > of already spawned processes able to do the work when required? I
> > would guess you can eliminate some of the spawn-time with that
> > solution. It is not much different from minimizing the time spent
> > under a lock by preallocation.
> >
> > --
> > J.
> >
>
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