[erlang-questions] Thoughts about server abstraction and process management

[zambal]

On 26 mrt, 09:07, Richard Carlsson <richa...@REDACTED> wrote:
> One approach to distributed garbage collection is to use a lease-based
> system. The idea is that an object/process will only stay alive as long
> as some client still holds a valid lease. Once the last lease expires,
> the object can be garbage collected. Clients will have to renew their
> leases on a regular basis if they want to keep using the object. What
> the default time for a lease should be depends on the problem; anything
> between 100 milliseconds and 100 days could be reasonable.
>
> With processes, you could make this a direct negotiation between the
> process and its clients, but then the process needs to be explicitly
> written to handle the lease system. You could also have a distinguished
> service that manages leases on processes, and which will simply kill off
> processes when their leases expire, by sending them an exit signal.

Interesting idea, but I'm not sure if managing leases would be less
error prone than managing the life cycle of a process from the
perspective of a programmer.

---vincent