🔗 Building distributed systems in Elixir: Part 7 — worker pool

How can a system efficiently handle many jobs without overwhelming its resources? This article introduces a custom Worker Pool built in Elixir, tackling the challenges of unbounded concurrency within distributed systems. It starts with the problems faced when a system has to manage a large number of jobs, emphasizing the need for a bounded concurrency approach to avoid resource exhaustion and CPU thrashing.

The worker pool manages a limited number of active workers, assigning jobs from a buffered queue as workers become available. By employing raw process primitives, the article breaks down the architecture, including the parent/client process, coordinator process, and worker processes. It provides complete implementations and execution traces, illustrating how this approach allows for effective task distribution while maintaining system stability.