[erlang-questions] Memory management

[James Hague]

Two possibilities come to mind.

The first is that a process is getting flooded with messages that it
isn't handling, so they sit in the mailbox until the process gets
killed.  Almost every time I've seen memory usage spike, it's because
of mailbox size.

The other possibility is that you've got a process which creates large
binaries over a short period of time.  Binaries are outside the
process heap, so it's possible to rapidly fill up memory  with
binaries before GC kicks in.