[erlang-questions] Millions of processes?

Zvi exta7@REDACTED
Tue Sep 23 18:22:07 CEST 2008


I'm no Linux expert, but

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_POSIX_Thread_Library

"The Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) is a software feature that enables
the Linux kernel to run programs written to use POSIX Threads fairly
efficiently.
In tests, NPTL succeeded in starting 100,000 threads on a IA-32 in two
seconds. In comparison, this test under a kernel without NPTL would have
taken around 15 minutes."

I guess future Erlang VM will offer some more generic MxN threading model,
i.e. M Erlang user-level processes implemented on N "schedulers" - native
threads.
Today in SMP Erlang is only limited support (i.e. command line options) to
specify number o scheduler and no programmatic support for affinity of
schedulers per core and Erlang processes per schedulers.

Zvi


Bob Ippolito wrote:
> 
> We've got a couple applications that use thousands of processes per
> node. If those were pthreads, we'd be out of RAM before actually doing
> anything.
> 
> 2008/9/23 Bard Bloom <bardb@REDACTED>:
>> I've seen in Erlang promotional materials some rather impressive claims
>> about how cheap Erlang processes are, and how many of them one can spawn.
>> Which is pretty cool. But, what Erlang programs take advantage of that
>> kind
>> of power? Are there any examples of programs which use huge numbers of
>> processes in interesting ways? (I am the local Erlang fancier. I got
>> challenged on that point, and didn't have a very good answer.)
>>
>> Thanks very much,
>> Bard Bloom
>>
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