[erlang-questions] Suggestions

[Chandru]

On 22 Aug 2007 11:01:29 +0200, Bjorn Gustavsson <bjorn@REDACTED> wrote:
> 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

This would be perfect. Anyone who supports erlang based applications
will be very grateful!

> > * 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.
>

Ah! I see. Is it possible to have the md5 as well in case the -vsn is specified?

> > * 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.
>

Thank you very much. Much appreciated.

Chandru