[erlang-questions] Regarding Erlang gen_server's ability to handle requests concurrently

[Felix Gallo]

Arshad --

A single gen_server instance is single-threaded, handling only one message
at a time.  Gen_servers are not necessarily network related; they have to
work in conjunction with libraries like gen_udp and gen_tcp in order to
arrange to send and receive messages on networks.

It's important to know that there are a few different kinds of socket:
"listen" sockets, which bind to a port on your computer's network interface
and wait for new connection attempts to get made, and "client" sockets,
which are sockets that can be communicated over once the connection has
been formed.  You can think of "client" sockets as having been peeled off a
"listen" socket.

Listen sockets can be shared by sending them as part of a message to
another process, or by passing them as an argument to a process spawn
function.  In the case of tcp sockets, it's fairly natural to open a listen
socket, spawn child processes, passing them the listen socket, and for each
of the children to call accept(), which then returns to them a fresh new
unique client socket, in order to concurrently handle many simultaneous
connections.  A worked example is here, in the documentation:
http://erlang.org/doc/man/gen_tcp.html#Examples .

Client sockets can also be shared and passed around, but since a client
socket can only be read by the client socket's owning process, this is of
limited utility.

There are a large number of tunable parameters on your network card, in
your operating system, and in erlang that you can fiddle with to obtain
optimum performance if you're worried about erlang's scalability; the
documentation for gen_tcp is a good place to start.  Fred's excellent
'Learn You Some Erlang' book also has a great chapter on all this:
http://learnyousomeerlang.com/buckets-of-sockets.

F.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 11:12 AM, Ehsan Mohammadi <ehsan.tck@REDACTED>
wrote:

> i`m new to erlang but as far as i know you can`t share a socket in
> multiple process or threads
> so you can accept and get raw data in single server and do processing in a
> server pool or something like that
>
> On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 8:35 PM Arshad Ansari <arshadansari27@REDACTED>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello there,
>>
>> This is a generic question that I have regarding the ability of
>> gen_server to handle requests concurrently. Does gen_server create a
>> separate process per request (even when for each request coming from same
>> socket connection) or does it create separate process per socket
>> connection? If it is latter then there will be a single process responsible
>> for handling large number of messaging coming from single socket. In that
>> case, how to make sure that that single process can handle a very high load
>> coming from a single connection?
>>
>> I hope my question is clear!
>>
>> Regards,
>> Arshad
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