Programming distributed erlang applications: pitfalls and recipes

We investigate the distributed part of the Erlang programminglanguage, with an aim to develop robust distributed systems andalgorithms running on top of Erlang runtime systems. Although the stepto convert an application running on a single node to a fullydistributed (multi-node) application is deceptively simple (changingcalls to spawn so that processes are spawned on differentnodes), there are some corner cases in the Erlang language and APIwhere the introduction of distribution can cause problems. In thispaper we discuss a number of such pitfalls, where the semantics ofcommunicating processes differs significantly depending if theprocesses reside on the same node or not, we also provide someguidelines for safe programming of distributed systems.