GoKawiilA worm in my Erlang cluster, and adventures in microfluidics
June 5 2026
Working on something in Elixir or on the BEAM where a fresh pair of eyes would help ? I take on a couple of days a week for consulting work : library design, structure review, exploratory prototypes...
See how I can help →
Just to be clear, it should maybe be “minifluidics” or “millifluidics” but I’ll ask for forgiveness on this one, because microfluidics reads better. We’ll see what this has to do with my Erlang cluster a bit later.
Sparsely connected Erlang clusters
An erlang cluster, by default, is fully meshed, meaning that every node maintains a connection to all the others. Since this can lead to excessive chatter and an explosion of edges, it is possible to not fully connect an Erlang cluster, and connect some peers to select peers. This means that instead of having a full mesh, you can cut sub-meshes in an Erlang (or Elixir) cluster and connect them together via bridges, aka single (or sparse) connections.
We will use this notation for graphs from now on, which can be interpreted by .dot visualizers :
graph G { a -- b; b -- c; a -- c; }
The above graph describes a fully-meshed 3-node graph, while the below one describes a 4-node cluster where the “d” node only connects to “c”, meaning the nodes form a triangle with a tail.
... continue reading