[erlang-questions] Embedded vs Interactive - Why embedded?

[Ryan Stewart]

# Quick Background

I inherited an Erlang system that's a fairly typical HTTP, almost-ReST API.
The nature of the API and what it represents made Erlang a good choice for
its concurrency aspects. As for the reliability aspects, we rely totally on
a typical HTTP/S load balancer setup for HA. We do rolling restarts behind
the LB and not hot code upgrades as enabled by Erlang because of the
complexity of Erlang upgrades.

# The Question

Why should we run embedded mode in production? It seems that's the unspoken
law for production systems, but why? Is there some performance overhead
running in interactive mode? I've read about Code Loading Strategy in the
System Principles User's Guide:
http://erlang.org/doc/system_principles/system_principles.html#id56789

I've also read about the mode differences in the code server:
http://erlang.org/doc/man/code.html

I don't see anything in any of the stdlib/OTP docs about *why* you would
choose embedded vs interactive mode. I'm leaning heavily toward using
interactive mode everywhere, dev through production, because it's so much
simpler and easy to understand. Someone please talk me out of it if that's
a terribly Bad Idea.

Ryan
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