Performance of send_message()

Pascal Brisset pascal.brisset@REDACTED
Fri Aug 4 21:36:51 CEST 2000


I'm not very familiar with erlang implementation details, but it
looks like the beam emulator in erts-4.9.1 sends messages by
structurally copying them into the receiver's mailbox. In other
words, sending a 2000-character string takes twice as long as
sending a 1000-character string, and uses twice as much memory in
the receiver's mailbox.

Are there plans to optimize this and pass pointers instead in the
case of local communications ? Is this compatible with the current
GC ? What would be the gain ?

I know I can "send" large amounts of data in constant time with
binaries, but then the overhead is in term_to_binary/binary_to_term.

- Pascal Brisset <pascal.brisset@REDACTED> +33 2 96051928 -
- France Telecom R&D DTL/MSV | 2, av Pierre Marzin | F-22307 Lannion -



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