Known BEAM memory leak ? Profiling tools ?

[Jon Holdsworth]

To the erlang-questions people:

Erlang running under Linux Redhat 6.1 on Intel and Solaris 2.7 on Sparc,
the BEAM program has been seen to apparently leak memory after being
left running for some time.  It is possible that this 'memory leak' is
in our own code, but it has not revealed itself yet.

We have looked at the erlang processes running, heap and stack thereof,
and also the ETS and Mnesia tables, and there appears to be nothing
amiss there, pointing to the virtual machine engine, but we are also
aware of how unlikely a fault in the engine is.

The worst-case leak seen so far caused beam to expand to about 200 MB,
as reported by 'top'.

Has anything like this been encountered before and if so is there a
known solution ?

Also - is there a best-recommended debugger that can be hooked into beam
to reveal memory usage and other profiling data on-the-fly ?   I was
suggesting getting Purify here at work and re-compiling beam with it,
but that is an expensive alternative.


Jon