[erlang-questions] Architecture: How to achieve concurrency when gen_server:handle_call waits?

[Luke]

Hi,

The way I'm getting my head around the actor model & OTP is to imagine it's
like an office building full of people with specialised jobs (gen_servers),
and you send emails to people who work on your request right away and reply
when they're done (for a handle_call). If I have used call then it's as if
I  fire off the email and sit there clicking refresh until I get a reply
(or like a literal call, I am on hold until they get back to me), but if I
use cast then I just get on with my day and maybe check my inbox again
later. I can see a lot of benefits with this kind of organisation of your
programs and like it a lot.

My problem is that when a gen_server is working on something they are busy
and can't answer more calls/casts. Is the correct way to achieve
concurrency in Erlang to have each gen_server spawn a brand new process and
then go back to checking their inbox again? In the office building
metaphor, essentially each worker also has access to an infinite pool of
interns and they are able to forward tasks, immediately delegating all the
work away (I used to work at Ericsson, I can see how this model comes
naturally to them :P)

If this is indeed the correct way to achieve concurrency, I still have the
following questions:
1 - Why isn't this done automatically behind the scenes in gen_server? When
would you ever not want to free up your gen_server to handle more requests?
2 - Is it best practice to spawn each new process under the gen_server, a
supervisor somewhere, or not all?
3 - If your gen_server is being flooded with messages, would one viable
solution to achieve concurrency be creating say 10 of the same gen_server
under a supervisor, and having any processes passing messages to this "job"
randomly pick one, effectively using probability to reduce traffic to each
by 1/10 - is there a library/methodology for doing this kind of thing
already?
4 - This seems like it would be a common piece of code, is this bundled
into OTP somewhere? Is this situation what I'm supposed to use gen_event
for? Or if I'm completely wrong, what is the actual way programs like yaws
achieve high concurrency, as reading the source code has not revealed the
answer to me.

Thanks,
Jed
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