[erlang-questions] Multi-core experience as of May, 2012

[OvermindDL1]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Raoul Duke <raould@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Olivier Girondel
> <olivier.girondel@REDACTED> wrote:
>> I meant "heavily/massively multicore", of course
>
> it does seem like there are folks claiming erlang doesn't even scale
> well for non-massively-multicore situations. so it would be
> interesting to learn what the nuances / dials / variables / issues
> are; how to win / avoid losing when it comes to scaling erlang on
> platforms.

Speaking as one that looks in to this, but only uses Erlang on a 3
cluster set up with 1 core each on two and 6 on one, it works well on
these.  But from reading the mailing list, forums, articles, it seems
Erlang starts to 'cap out' at a cluster of around 70, just due to mesh
communications swamping everything else.  *However* it is possible to
partition an Erlang mesh by using hidden nodes and/or custom
communication protocols, and doing that should allow you to expand
pretty arbitrarily, based on the type of program(s) run on the
cluster.  Thus Erlang can do many-core, you just have to take it into
account when you program for it.