maximum number of linked processes

[Hal Snyder]

How many processes may be linked to a given process?

Here's why I'm interested:

It seems natural to associate Erlang processes with session-like
things like phone calls and web sessions. These processes can keep
state and accumulate data for the call/session, and then spool out
a detail record to the enterprise database when closing.

It is sometimes useful to link instance processes to manager processes
for such things as mapping (finding the process for a given session),
monitoring, resource management, and cleanup.

One issue when looking at scaling this idea is, how many session-
tracking processes could be linked to a single managing process?
Concerns are numeric limits as well as performance issues dealing
with say 200000 links rapidly coming and going.


Section 7.2 of the R9C Efficiency Guide,

  http://www.erlang.org/doc/r9c/doc/efficiency_guide/advanced.html#7.2

mentions several important limits, including total number of processes
(32768 default, settable to 16-262144 via erl +P); but, it does not
mention a limit, absolute or practical, on how many links there may be.