hard limits?

[Ulf Wiger]

On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Bob wrote:

bob>I've read most everything I could find in the last two days, but
bob>have not been able to find a document discussing the hard limits of
bob>Erlang.

I can't really think of any hard limits in the language itself.
I'm sure you didn't mean that either, but nevertheless it's an
important distinction to make.

bob>Is it accurate to say that Erlang scales to the limits of the
bob>hardware?  Mnesia must have some limits on limits?

At AXD 301, we have run into some of the limitations of the 
runtime system:

- We ran into the 256 MB limit previously in BEAM
- We ran into the limit of ca 2000 ETS tables

Now, BEAM can address 1 GB, which is more than enough for us, and the ETS
table limit has been raised to some 6500 or so, which makes it less likely
that we'll run out of tables again (we also redesigned our software.)

We've also run out of file descriptors, but that was due to an OS setting,
not Erlang.

Bascally, the limits change as the runtime system is improved.
The ETS table limit is still unnecessarily low, because the 
removal of tables due to process termination involves a linear
search. If someone could fix that, we could raise the ETS table
limit to some absurdly high number.

/Uffe

Ulf Wiger, Chief Designer AXD 301
Ericsson Telecom AB                          tfn: +46  8 719 81 95
Varuvägen 9, Älvsjö                          mob: +46 70 519 81 95
S-126 25 Stockholm, Sweden                   fax: +46  8 719 43 44