If anyone would like to see a nice example of how someone who actually knows Erlang would approach the same sort of problem that they OP tried and failed to exa

If anyone would like to see a nice example of how someone who actually knows Erlang would approach the same sort of problem that they OP tried and failed to examine in "the Erlang way" you would be well-advised to check out Jay Nelson' "Concurrent Caching" paper ( http://www.duomark.com/erlang/publications/acm2006.pdf http://www.duomark.com/erlang/publications/acm2006.pdf). If one were to do the same thing today there would be a lot more third-party libraries to lean on for additional functionality within the solution-space and to enhance the feature set.