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Thanks for infusing realism into the Erlang hype. As you point out "There is no free lunch". People also frequently tend to forget Amdahl's law when discussing Erlang and somehow assume that "Erlang = Linear Scaling" regardless of algorithm and problem.

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I agree - however some slack can be cut to erlang - it has proven itself to be "carrier grade" (running exchanges). However, I think its most exciting attribute is reliable fault tolerant software you can bet your life on (relatively speaking !). Not so much the scalability (although its the scalability which gets all the press at the moment).

but, can you scale an application without making it reliable ? imho, they are two sides of the same coin.

I think you can, if you really want to ;) eg think of "striping" user data and sessions across a farm of servers. You can scale out that way, yet one server goes down and some portion of users are not being serviced.

I guess that is possibly more reliable then you started with, as the rest of the servers are ok, so you are probably right.

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