Mnesia and millions of processes

Ulf Wiger has being doing some tests putting the Erlang database Mnesia through its paces on a 16GB Sparc. This post to the Erlang mailing list describes some of the findings. Here's a summary:

On a 16 GB machine, you can:

• run 6 million simultaneous processes
  (through use of erlang:hibernate, I was actually
  able to run 20 million - spawn time: 6.3 us,
  message passing time: 5.3 us, and I had
  1.8 GB to spare.)


• populate mnesia with at least 12 GB of data, but
  think through how you want to represent it, since
  the 64-bit word size blows things up a bit.


• keep a 10 GB+ disc_copy table in mnesia. The
  load times and log dump cost seem acceptable
  (10 minutes to load, dumping takes a while but
  runs in the background quite nicely.)

6 million running processes on a single machine is very impressive!

Categories: erlang