[erlang-questions] process per task or not ?

[akonsu]

Hello,

I am looking for an advice on how to architect my system. I am just a
beginner...

I have a process that receives messages and this process needs to parse
each message, extract some information from the parsed message, and then
send this information to the subscribers.

As I read somewhere, in a situation like this, people usually spawn a
worker process per message, and let this worker do the work, and then send
the results to the publishers.

I have an overwhelming amount of incoming messages (these are tweets that I
get from a twitter stream), and I am not experienced enough to be able to
tell whether this worker-per-task approach is the right way to do it. I am
afraid that my application will be flooded with workers and eventually can
collapse.

I was thinking that maybe I can use a worker process pool? A process pool
seems unusual in an Erlang application, does it not? Although the "Learn
yourself Erlang..." does have a chapter on building a pool like this.

Or maybe rate-limit the number of incoming messages?

I would really appreciate an advice or two.

Thank you
Konstantin
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