[erlang-questions] how message size effects performance

[Cliff Moon]

What about messages to other nodes?  Clearly that involves a copy since 
it has to go across the wire, even if there are large binaries.  Some 
people seem to think that the VM will block while the message is getting 
sent.  So if you have a 20meg binary you want to send to another node 
all in one Erlang message will that get split up?  Or does it block the 
whole VM to send a message that large?

Per Gustafsson wrote:
> Cliff Moon wrote:
>> Does anyone have or know of a good breakdown of how message size 
>> affects performance, particularly remote messages?  I've heard 
>> conflicting reports from people about how the Erlang VM deals with 
>> messages that have a high byte count (large binaries, etc).  Some 
>> people say that the VM will handle large messages cleanly and in a 
>> performant manner, while others have told me that large messages tend 
>> to degrade the performance of the entire VM.  I could run benchmarks, 
>> but to save me the time does anyone have any sort of data on this?
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> All the data in messages are copied except for large binaries (larger 
> than 64 bytes). So sending large messages in which the bulk of the 
> data is not large binaries will lead to poor performance and high 
> memory consumption.
>
> Per
>