"Regarding the issue of why a logger process in Erlang does not get overwhelved, this is the reply I got from Raimo Niskanen (Erlang team at Ericsson):
There is a small fix in the scheduler for the standard
producer/consumer problem: A process that sends to a
receiver having a large receive queue gets punished
with a large reduction (number of function calls)
count for the send operation, and will therefore
get smaller scheduling slots."
Sending to a mailbox costs reductions proportional to how many messages are already queued. While this isn't a perfect solution, it should influence the scheduler quite a bit. (Imagine trying to do that sort of thing in node.js!)
