Using Erlang, how should I distribute load amongst a cluster?

Question

I was looking at the slave/pool modules and it seems similar to what I want, but it also seems like I have a single point of failure in my application (if the master node goes d

Answer 1

The purpose of a supervision tree is to manage the processes not necessarily forward requests. There is no reason you couldn't use different code to send requests directly to members of the list of available processes. See the pool:get_nodes or pool:get_node() functions for one way to get those lists.

You can let the pool module handle the management of the processes (restarting, monitoring, and killing processing) and use some other module to transparently redirect requests to the pool of processes. Maybe you were looking for distributed pools though? It'll be hard to get away from the master process in erlang whithout going to distributed nodes. The whole running system is pretty much one large supervision tree.