It's weird to see "large messages" as a code smell. I'd say it's more of a thing to be aware about if you use any BEAM-based language: that's just how the runti

It's weird to see "large messages" as a code smell. I'd say it's more of a thing to be aware about if you use any BEAM-based language: that's just how the runtime works. But, if you're constantly sending large messages between processes, that might be a sign that those two processes are not as independent as you though, and it might be good to think if there's a way to merge them into a single process. Another option might be see if you can transform those messages into ref-counter binaries, which will make sending messages quite cheap, since you're sending a single reference to the binary, instead of the whole thing. There's a tradeoff here, of course, depending on how expensive it is to transform your data into a binary, as well as increased complexity of garbage collection of these binaries.