For what you describe a tuple actually seems like a good choice. Some questions though:
- How many elements in this “array”?
- How static is this “array” to be?
- Is it to be globally accessed or through one process?
- When randomly picking a process is it enough just to generate a random number and use that as index?
- Is there any other semantics to this “array” than just storing the pids and picking one randomly?
Having very large tuples is inefficient when you update them. You basically make a copy of the whole tuple every time, but not the elements themselves of course. If it is relatively static then a tuple will work fine, doing your occasional deletes would probably work fine. Otherwise the :array module mentioned by @NobbZ is a good alternative. Maybe just using a map would work as well.
Tuples :array’s and maps are local to one process so if multiple processes need to access it then perhaps using an ETS table would be better. These can be globally accessed however they have no built in transaction mechanism so you might need a process to manage them.
