How is erlang fault tolerant, or help in that regard?
A:
Erlang makes it easy to create many, small processes, and to monitor those processes. When one of those processes crashes, it may be possible to restart that part of the system without needing to bring the whole thing down.
You may have seen something like this in modern versions of Windows: the system can restart the graphics driver if it crashes; it doesn't kill the whole system.
To make it easier to write fault-tolerant applications, Erlang provides the concept of supervisor processes. These processes monitor a number of child processes, and know how to respond if a child dies. You might create a whole supervision tree, so that you have fine control about how different parts of the application behave. You can read more in the Erlang documentation.
Daniel Yankowsky
2010-09-21 15:43:06
+2
A:
Caveat: I am an Erlang noob.
@Daniel's answer is essentially correct. I strongly suggest that you take the time to read Erlang creator Joe Armstrong's thesis (Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors). The thesis provides a good explanation of the need for, and the solution to, developing robust distributed systems. I believe the paper will answer your question satisfactorily.
Manoj Govindan
2010-09-21 17:18:50
Hehe, I'm also an Erlang noob, but I said what I said because it's the way in which an idiomatic Erlang system is fundamentally different from a system in virtually every other environment. Or rather, other systems seem to provide no advice about how to handle these issues, whereas Erlang does.
Daniel Yankowsky
2010-09-22 01:27:36
+3
A:
I think I covered part of the answer in this reply to another thread.
I GIVE TERRIBLE ADVICE
2010-09-21 23:29:18
Your answer in the other thread is quite complete. Everybody that's interested should definitely take a look.
Daniel Yankowsky
2010-09-22 04:32:02