Building Distributed Systems in Elixir: Part 7 - Worker Pool (From Scratch)

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Hey everyone! :waving_hand:

I’ve published Part 7 of the Building Distributed Systems in Elixir series, where we build core distributed systems and concurrency patterns from first principles using raw process primitives (spawn, send, receive) before reaching for OTP abstractions.

In this part, we explore Worker Pools and Bounded Concurrency

:light_bulb: What’s covered:

  • The Problem with Unbounded Concurrency: Why spawning 10,000 processes for heavy tasks leads to socket/database exhaustion and memory pressure.
  • Demand-Driven / Pull-Based Distribution: How workers pull tasks when idle instead of pushing work blindly, implementing backpressure naturally.
  • Atomic Completion & Availability: Combining job completion notifications and worker re-availability into a single message ({:available, worker_id, self(), job, result}) to prevent race conditions.
  • Graceful Pool Lifecycle: Coordinating shutdown signals across a coordinator and worker pool without dangling processes.

:books: Links:

Feedback, thoughts, and discussions are always welcome!

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Excellent work man! I stopped at part 4 and have been waiting for the rest. Now I can resume from where I stopped. :slight_smile:

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Thanks a lot! :blush: Glad you’re enjoying the series. Hope the upcoming parts are useful too!

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Oh, I’m sure the upcoming parts will be useful. Keep them coming!

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Just a nudge, @pckrishnadas88. I know you are busy, but I’m patiently waiting for the next article in the series :wink:

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Sure will update it was bit busy with my sister’s wedding arrangements which is this weekend.

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Oh wow! Congratulations to your sister and to you, Mr. Brother-in-law!

For now focus on the wedding; I/we can wait until next week! Have fun!

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