The problem with a web server is that I'm not sure there's much interesting inter-process communication which I think is where erlang would really shine. Sure you can spawn a lightweight process for each incoming connection, but after that?

The things you would end up learning about Erlang while writing a web server aren't as much about processes but more about pattern matching.

Most people focus on Erlang as an easy way for multi-core/multiprocessor and distributed computing and it is wonderful at that, but the core of the language is a pattern matching engine that is simply amazing.

Also, anyone who thinks that Erlang is slow with regular expression should convert the regular expressions into a binary and try some pattern matching. That tends to be more of the Erlang Way of doing things ...

true, but what about a comet one? that way its doing a little more than serving up data.

A friend of mine is working on a comet server in Erlang at http://code.google.com/p/erlycomet/

that looks pretty smart. Anyone know what the hardware to connections ratio is for it?