title: What is Erlang's secret to scalability?
body: <p>Erlang is getting a reputation for being untouchable at handling a large volume of messages and requests.  I haven't had time to download and try to get inside Mr. Erlang's understanding of switching theory...  so I'm wondering if someone can teach me (or point to a good instructional site.)</p>
  
  <p>Say as a thought-experiment I wanted to port the Erlang ejabberd to a combination of Python and C, in a way that gave me the same speed and scalability.  What structures or patterns would I have to understand and implement?  (Does Python's Twisted already do this?)</p>