Is it typically possible for Erlang to use (schedule across) multiple cores (SMP) in a typical VPS-hosted situation? I don't know much about virtual hosting or xen or anything else, but my understanding is that erlang would live in a "virtual machine instance" (alongside many other ones) and I'm guessing there would not be scheduling across multiple cores... unless the virtual machine instance had multiple cores. But if so, those would probably be VIRTUAL multiple cores, right? So unless they map to real cores....
How does this work with erlang, or indeed, does it work with erlang in a VPS-hosted environment?
It does not matter what kind of solution is below your OS. BEAM knows only how many cores are exposed by OS. You can chose to use all of them (default when SMP) or some of them or just one.