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Last active December 17, 2015 19:59
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TL;DR: gproc probably isn't what you need, but OTP's global module will probably work fine.

gproc 1 has a module gproc_dist that uses gen_leader 2 for coordination, no mnesia is involved. Some of the details for how it was originally designed are in Ulf's paper on it 3.

The significant disadvantages are:

  • The node list by default must be static and known at start time! This will make expanding the cluster a non-starter without changes to gproc and/or gen_leader. There appears to be some experimental/undocumented way to expand a cluster that might work 4
  • There might be incorrect logic for net-splits (either detection or resolution) 5

There doesn't appear to be a better global process registry available. The only other one I was able to find easily was ngproc 6 which suffers from the same sort of limitations and doesn't seem to be actively maintained.

My recommendation for now is to OTP's global 7 module. There are downsides to this too, but I think it will probably work best for your use case in the short to medium term. Make sure to read through the docs there pretty carefully.

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