Getting locks and sharing: was RE: Getting concurrency

Richard A. O'Keefe ok@REDACTED
Mon Jun 20 04:24:45 CEST 2005


"Ulf Wiger" <ulf@REDACTED> wrote:
	> 	RPC1 - between two processes in the same Erlang node
	
	Here, we are 'guaranteed' that messages cannot be dropped.
	
Where is that promised?  I can think of all sorts of reasons why
RPC1 might be unreliable.  I didn't like the idea at first, but then
it dawned on me that if there are lots of messages being sent to a process
which, though live, isn't bothering to listen (or is listening for the
wrong thing), the mailbox will eventually take over all available memory
to the detriment of other processes UNLESS at some point messages are
discarded.  To put it gnomically, the only way to achieve reliability
is by means of unreliability.




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