If you are worried about transitive connections in the cluster, you can make your nodes hidden
and manage your cluster manually, so you’ll avoid needless connections
TheSquad
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easco
As I understand it, by default, Erlang will create a fully connected mesh of nodes. What that means is that if you have n machines in the mesh, each node, by default, will connect to the other n - 1 nodes. With that fully connected mesh, each connection requires a little bit of overhead and at some point that overhead becomes overwhelming.
The key words in the above, however, are by default. You can take greater control over the ways that the machines are connected - you don’t have to use a fully connected mesh. One configuration I’ve read about is a hash-ring where the computers are connected so that they know one or two other nodes, and form a ring. There could very well be more than 50 nodes in the ring, but it’s not possible to directly send a message from each node, to every other node.
So your ability to create large networks of Erlang nodes is affected by the topology of the connections.
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