[erlang-questions] Garbage Collector Details

[Johannes Auer]

Greetings!

I am interested in some details about the GC of Erlang. I found some papers explaining the private heap architecture of the GC, but the paper was lacking some important details:

It says that a message is first copied to the private heap of the receiving process, and afterwards a pointer to that message is placed in the message queue. But copying to the heap would require locking, since many processes can send messages concurrently to the same receiving process. Could someone explain what is happening *exactly* when a message is sent from one process to another?

Thanks for you help!
Johannes