[erlang-questions] Suggestions

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

Chandru <chandrashekhar.mullaparthi@REDACTED> writes:

> 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.

We will probably implement it in a future release. I can't promise
that it will be in R12B. We would like to implement some general (or at
least semi-general) way to pass some sort of filter specification to
processes(). Otherwise we will end up implementing a lot of
special-purposes BIFs

> * 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 :-)

If you don't set the -vsn attribute in your source code, the compiler
will automatically set it to the MD5 for the module.

Also, beam_lib:md5/1 will calculate the MD5 for a .beam file.

> * 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.

We will probably implement that in R12B.

> cheers
> Chandru
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-- 
Björn Gustavsson, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB