Concatenating atoms

[Sean Hinde]

On 4 Feb 2005, at 21:06, Valentin Micic wrote:

>> If you don't care (short-running program, or willing
>> to reboot every now and then, or node restarted often
>> enough for it not to practically matter, or whatever)
>> or know/guarantee/require that you have a bounded
>> "working set" of atoms over the lifetime of the node,
>> then yes: that is enough. Otherwise, no.
>>
>
> We had an application that run for more than a year without reboot. 
> Once we
> had a power failure, hence had to restart. It was a mission to 
> start-up the
> system. As usual, documentation was minimalistic, nobody knew what was 
> going
> on, left hand did not know what the right was doing... We did learn 
> from it.
> It is good practise to restart any system, no matter how stable it 
> might be.
> Keeps your operations guys happy ;-). The trick is not to lose any 
> traffic
> over it.

Many of our systems run for more than a year between restarts. 
Operations know how to type

bin/start

so I'm not too concerned about the magnitude of the startup mission ;-)

GC of atoms or equivalent would be nice to have - witness the huge 
recent effort to remove all dynamically generated atoms from yaws. It 
was trivial to launch a DoS attack against yaws until this was done. I 
don't know if any measurements were done before and after - anyone?

Sean