[erlang-questions] SCTP support (was EPIPE and TCP sockets)

[Sean Hinde]

On 13 Oct 2007, at 16:40, G Bulmer wrote:

>
>
> Anybody - On a related track, do all Erlang messages between two
> specific Erlang nodes go down one socket?

Yes.

> [I thought the response to my question would be out-of-order delivery
> being the killer SCTP feature, but maybe that isn't an issue].

It can issue if you are not aware of it. If you send a large message  
via the normal erlang distribution then all other messages between  
nodes will be blocked until the large message has been sent. And,  
yes, it is a real example..

sctp could provide an elegant solution to this - assign a separate  
sctp stream to each pair of processes that are exchanging messages.

Another answer would be for the existing tcp based erlang  
distribution mechanism to split up large erlang messages after  
conversion to the external protocol byte stream and multiplex at a  
lower level.

I suspect that either of these mechanisms would reveal bugs in  
previously working code, though neither should break the written  
guarantees about message ordering.

Sean