Erlang limits

[Peter Eis]

Ulf Wiger wrote:

>> As we are planning to create an application where it it most likely
>> that we will have more than 256 nodes connected to each other this
>> is a serious problem for us.
> 
> 
> It may not be an unsurmountable problem if your application is not
> such that all nodes must talk to each other, or one or more nodes must
> be in contact with all other nodes.
> 
> If you start the erlang nodes with the flag -connect_all false,
> then erlang will not make sure that all nodes connect to all other
> nodes. Nodes will still connect automatically as soon as a process on
> one node tries to send a message to a process on another node, but
> this is something that you can control in your application.

That really might save us from further troubles. Indeed only some nodes 
have to be fully connected while the clients don't have to know each other.

> 
> 
> Running your network with connect_all=false means that each node will
> only know about a subset of the other nodes -- as long as this subset
> is < 256, you won't have a problem with the limit.
> 
> You might want to consider using a sort of proxy nodes. It is not too
> hard to write a proxy process that allows you to send messages to any
> given node in the network, but where the message may have to pass
> through another node on the way.

We discussed that possibility too. In combination with connect_all=false 
I think it's the way we'll go as now we just have to set up some nodes 
to communicate with the clients. The only disadvantage is that the 
messages will have to pass one more node. But as passing messages is 
pretty fast that won't be a problem.

Thank you very much for the quick response.

Regard,
Peter