[erlang-questions] Maximum number of children for simple_one_for_one supervisor?

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Sep 4, 2012, at 3:42 PM, Son Tran-Nguyen <esente@REDACTED> wrote:

> My question is how many event managers can the supervisor manage? My goal may
> get to million of children. I see that I can create millions of processes, but
> not sure whether the supervisor can manage it effectively.

My guess would be you will run into limitations long before that. A gentle guess is that a process takes 500 bytes. One million of those is thus half a gigabyte. The supervisor can manage this number, but of course it will use more CPU time and memory managing this large amount by itself.

My best advice is: Try it and see. We don't know enough about what you are trying to build, so we cannot estimate what will work for you. You will need to set up some hard numbers and then work towards that goal. Also, what hardware do you have available? And do you plan to run distribution? Answering these questions might help you going further.

You should be able to write an attempt in a relatively short time frame. Just try spawning a million children like the ones you are seeking to run and see if that works for you.