Mastering Functional Programming

Parallel nature of the task

The preceding task was chosen as an example for this chapter because it is parallelizable by nature. Basically, whenever you have a bunch of tasks that are not dependent one on another, it may be a good idea to parallelize the tasks. In our example, the preceding task can be very well conceptualized as a set of independent operations. A single unit of operation is the task of visiting a URL, abstracting all of the other nodes that are linked by the page of this URL, and then executing the same task on these URLs recursively.

This makes our crawling example a very good case for parallel actor application. Running all these tasks sequentially for every URL may be very time consuming, and therefore it is much more ...