[erlang-questions] local vs. distributed differences?

[Richard Andrews]

> reading the McErlang stuff, i learned that message delivery order is
> only guaranteed when things aren't distributed. (looking around on the
> net, it i've heard that it is further only when you have multiple
> messages going from the same sender to the same receiver.)
> 
> so it sounds like taking a multi-actor local system and then trying to
> scale out by moving to a bigger distributed system could turn up some
> interesting "bugs". what are people's experience with this?

In my experience order of delivery *is* guaranteed between any *two* processes. You can consider the vaguaries of network propagation time as being similar to unpredictable scheduling of processes.
 
The same problem exists within a single node. eg. given processes A, B and C where A sends two messages to C and B sends one messages to C - the messages at C may be ordered:
 A1,A2,B1 or
 B1,A1,A2 or
 A1,B1,A2
depending on the relative scheduling of A and B. But A2 will always be after A1 in the mailbox. Same is true between nodes except that some messages may not be delivered at all.


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