[erlang-questions] Suggestions

[Chandru]

Hi,

I have a couple of suggestions to make to the OTP team.

* Can a command which shows only processes with non-zero message
queues be added (similar to c:i() but shows only processes which have
non-zero message queues). Will be very helpful when a node is going
wrong and eating up all available CPU. I know it can be done using a
combination of c:processes() and then checking the message queue
length of each process using erlang:process_info but in a high load
situation, fetching the list of processes and walking the process list
is time and resource consuming and might make things worse.

* Along with the various metadata stored in a beam file such as the
compiler version used, can the MD5 checksum of the source file be
stored in the beam file? It helps sometimes in figuring out which
version of a particular source file was used to produce a beam file.
Info in the -vsn attribute in the module can be misleading because
sometimes local modifications would've been done without the version
number being updated. I guess the checksum has to be calculated
without any preprocessing of the module. (Sean will probably ask me to
check-in the source code before using the resulting beam file, but
there still are times when this will be useful :-)

* It would nice for erlang:process_info/1 to support as input, a list
of attributes instead of just one. Sometimes, I don't want to call
erlang:process_info/0 as the process might have a large message queue
and it just makes things worse. Instead I want multiple items of info.
If a try to query in a loop, sometimes the process would've died half
way through.

cheers
Chandru