Three words: distributed hash table. Erlang has numerous well worn libraries and packages that provide this functionality. The fact that you are even thinking a

Three words: distributed hash table. Erlang has numerous well worn libraries and packages that provide this functionality. The fact that you are even thinking about creating a single process to handle all lookups means you don't understand message passing based concurrency yet. This article takes a deeply interesting problem (paradigms in distributed computing) and manages to discuss nothing of substance.