http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-Highly-Available-Systems-in-Erlang Overview of Erlang memory model, per thread heap and low thread footprint - http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/04/erlang-vs-java-memory-architecture.html Concurrency is an area where Erlang shines - http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3364027251 And then, note the flatness of Erlang CPU-time curves and decent C (coroutine) performance compared to abysmal Java 6 and C++ (Pthreads) data in this benchmark - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/fulldata.php?test=message&p1=hipe-2&p2=gpp-2&p3=gcc-2&p4=java-0 Another article about Erlang, contains pointers to useful site and reference large scale project - http://www.ddj.com/architect/201001928?cid=RSSfeed_DDJ_ArchitectDebug http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/08/erlang-java-for-concurrent-futur http://www.ddj.com/blog/architectblog/archives/2007/10/functional_prog.html Mnesia , DBMS powered by Erlang - http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/08/mnesia Comment of OO from Joe Armstrong, http://www.sics.se/~joe/bluetail/vol1/v1_oo.html , that tell why Erlang look like this, and why me and my college feel uncomfortable with it.... Some issues of Erlang - http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=276&thread=226786 Map reduce at Erlang - http://horicky.blogspot.com/2008/06/exploring-erlang-with-mapreduce.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an.html