It’s a common misconception that you should use processes to structure your application. Instead use modules to organize your application and use processes when you need concurrency or shared state between processes.

I think you should start by considering the external interface of your application, right now it’s a black box so you can design it however you want. But if you add an HTTP interface you probably want to handle requests in parallel, so the web server will start a process per connection or request. So now you need shared state between these processes which can be solved as you proposed, but your solutions are overly complex. Why a process per employee, why not a single process for all employees, or a single process for your whole database?

You should also be careful about using processes to store information that is not transient. You don’t want to lose employee information because the employee process crashed.

Employees, timecard events, schedules, vacations, and overtime may be important concepts for structuring data and possibly even parts of application state but really don’t inform much in terms application behaviour.

Alan Kay (1998)

I’m sorry that I long ago coined the term “objects” for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is “messaging” …

This comment highlights how people like to focus in on (static) “objects” because that is comparatively easy when in fact the application value is derived primarily by the (dynamic) “collaborations” that implement application behaviour.

Similarly in a BEAM application the ideal process structure is influenced much more heavily by the behaviour the application is meant to exhibit rather than the structure of the data it is managing or transforming.

This Erlang developer puts a different spin on it:
Lambda Days 2015 - Torben Hoffmann - Thinking like an Erlanger

Processes as the building blocks for protocols - so the big idea is designing protocols realized through communicating processes to implement application behaviour.

This is impossible to answer. If we take your employees as an example, using one process per employee is likely wrong because it’s hard to argue why you should have one process per employee instead of a single process holding a list of employees. You also want to store schedules, should they be stored separately from employees? Possibly, but what would you gain from that?

Eventually you can consider storing the whole database in one process. What are the benefits and downsides of this? One benefit is less complexity, one process is simpler than multiple, another is that you can more easily implement transactions because you don’t need synchronization between multiple process.

One downside can be seen as an code organization, all your database would be in one location, but this is the misconception. Code is organized with modules, so you can have multiple modules for one process. Another downside can be scalability, you may want to shard your database to multiple process so you can use all your cores. This is when you should start considering using multiple process.

So to summarize, it is hard to answer this question because you are asking how to structure an application using processes when we are saying that you shouldn’t. I would suggest that you start writing the application without processes or with a single process and then when you hit a road block that you think processes will solve come back and ask a question that is specific to your problem and less abstract and hypothetical.

Yes, that’s the misconception. You should start by structuring your application using modules and then add processes where they are actually needed to solve your business problems.

Processes can definitely serve a few different purposes when designing an application, and sometimes it’s fun to just play around a bit, trying out a totally different way of doing things. Like implementing an OO approach with processes…

However, for me it tends to come down to a few core points:

Concurrency

This is of course the first thing one tends to learn about the BEAM – concurrency is implemented by processes exchanging messages, after all. There’s no point in launching 2 million processes just because you can, however; try to stay close to the natural concurrency of the problem you’re solving.

If devices, end users, etc are connecting to your application, then that’s usually a good start – each of those probably need at least one process, for as long as they’re interacting. Do you have recurring tasks, cleanup tasks, etc? They probably also need their own processes. But… each semi-involved task of some kind that’s initiated by a user of the system? It might not be warranted a process of its own; perhaps every user has a single “background worker”, effectively serializing tasks per user in order to democratize resources somewhat, making sure a single user can’t bog down the entire system…

Fault Isolation

This one didn’t really “click” for me until I’d started learning Erlang a long time ago, and after reading a couple of books and trying some examples, decided that I needed to build something “for real”.

As I was toying around with a small online game prototype, juggling things like TCP connections, command processing, long-running environmental effects, room-based communication and navigation etc, I finally realized that processes are a very powerful tool for fault isolation – especially in combination with proper supervision trees.

I was used to C/C++ mostly at the time, where errors usually are a bit of an all or nothing affair; either you anticipate and handle the error where it occurs, or your whole application comes crashing down. Naturally you’ve got ways to carefully navigate around that, but it’s not easy either way.

With the BEAM, instead, we can start to think about what parts of our systems that can safely fail, and how we can best handle that. User input processing and TCP communication? That all happens in user-specific processes, and if something fails, we just need to make sure that we’ve structured our processes so that everything that needs to be stopped / restarted is properly linked.

As a consequence, you can start thinking about separating very simple, reliable core parts of your application into their own supervision tree(s), so that even if everything else comes crashing down, those parts will survive, either to make sure everything else is properly restarted again, or if nothing else, to safely shut down, perhaps persisting critical data etc.

Serialization

Another important concern is if you have some part of you application that can’t handle concurrency at all; this can then be wrapped in a process that manages whatever it needs to do, allowing other processes to send messages at will but always confident that you’re processing them one at a time.

Naturally this can turn into a performance bottleneck, so it requires some careful thinking. If you’re writing to a transaction log, for example, perhaps it’s tolerable to keep the last few transactions in memory, only flushing to disk every now and then, in order to achieve better throughput. Yes, you risk losing some transactions - but depending on what you’re doing that may be perfectly acceptable.