[octacat]

gen_server is a serializer, it is the point of it to begin with. Could be called gen_serializer ;) Because we need to update the state inside of it without locks.

It is usually fine, for parallelism just use a pool of gen_servers or many gen_server processes that would map to your data model well (example, one gen_server for each network socket).

Though, these properties of gen_server come from the fact it is just a single erlang process.

[davidw]

> just use a pool of gen_servers or many gen_server processes

I think architecting an Erlang system can be kind of tricky because you do have to think about all these processes sort of co-existing at the same time and how they interact. With one system I was involved with, we weren't really satisfied with how we'd divided things up among different behaviors, and did some refactoring. It wasn't difficult, but it did require a different way of thinking about things. When we had it all working, I was really satisfied with the results though. That thing was robust, and quite resilient.

I miss working with Erlang. It's tricky to find people who are using it or Elixir in the sweet spot, IMO. Lots of "it looked cool and we wanted to play around with it" out there, as well as some people thinking it'll magically make their systems "internet scale".

My best experiences with it have been semi-embedded systems where it's not doing too much distributed computing, but where "robust" and "predictable" are important qualities.

[toast0]

> I think architecting an Erlang system can be kind of tricky because you do have to think about all these processes sort of co-existing at the same time and how they interact.

I find it easier to think about each process in isolation --- what messages does it get, and what does it do with them; if it needs to send messages, who/where does it send them to and what will it get back, including errors or timeouts and not worrying about what the other process does in the moment.

The overall behavior of a system built from communicating processes can get hard to predict though. You build up observations, intuition, and escape hatches over time.