[erlang-questions] Questions about small message, big computation & SMP

[Lhfcws GMail]

I’ve read some books or blogs, i.e. <Erlang OTP in Action>, and they all encourage small message and big computation. However, if I want to make use of the concurrency or SMP, I have to spawn many processes to transform the serialized codes into parallelized codes, which may cause many message passing among these processes. It seems like a paradox.

Actually I think I am not understanding the rule “small message, big computation” well. Can anyone explain it more clearly? 

Thank you!