How does shared memory vs message passing handle large data structures?

Question

In looking at Go and Erlang's approach to concurrency, I noticed that they both rely on message passing.

This approach obviously alleviates the need for complex locks because there is no shared state.

However, consider the case of many clients wanting parallel read-only access to a single large data structure in memory -- like a suffix array.

My questions:

• Will using shared state be faster and use less memory than message passing, as locks will mostly be unnecessary because the data is read-only, and only needs to exist in a single location?

• How would this problem be approached in a message passing context? Would there be a single process with access to the data structure and clients would simply need to sequentially request data from it? Or, if possible, would the data be chunked to create several processes that hold chunks?

• Given the architecture of modern CPUs & memory, is there much difference between the two solutions -- i.e., can shared memory be read in parallel by multiple cores -- meaning there is no hardware bottleneck that would otherwise make both implementations roughly perform the same?

Answer 1

One thing to realise is that the Erlang concurrency model does NOT really specify that the data in messages must be copied between processes, it states that sending messages is the only way to communicate and that there is no shared state. As all data is immutable, which is fundamental, then an implementation may very well not copy the data but just send a reference to it. Or may use a combination of both methods. As always, there is no best solution and there are trade-offs to be made when choosing how to do it.

The BEAM uses copying, except for large binaries where it sends a reference.