Process balancing in Erlang

Question

Does anybody knows if there is a sort of 'load-balancer' in the erlang standard library? I mean, if I have some really simple operations on a really large set of data, the overhead of constructing a process for every item will be larger than perform the operation sequentially. But if I can balance the work in the 'right number' of process, it will perform better, so I'm basically asking if there is an easy way to accomplish this task.

By the way, does anybody knows if an OTP application does some kind of balance load? I mean, in an OTP application there is the concept of a "worker process" (like a java-ish thread worker)?

Answer 1

See modules pg2 and pool.

pg2 implements quite simple distributed process pool. pg2:get_closest_pid/1 returns "closest" pid, i.e. random local process if available, otherwise random remote process.

pool implements load balancing between nodes started with module slave.