[erlang-questions] Memory Leak

andrew mmc andrewmmc@REDACTED
Tue May 26 23:23:44 CEST 2009


Hello, thanks for getting back to me.
I am not registering any processes, and I should not be close to the limit
of how many I can spawn - at least not by the time erlang crashes.  if I run
top, I can see the memory usage increase slowly until it eventually crashes
at ~4Gb.  Obviously I am not using the 64-bit implementation, but if I were,
physical memory would then be a problem and I might get to a few percent of
the data set processed.

As for 'pretty quickly' - a few hours, but by the time <1% of the data set
has been processed.  It's pretty annoying because otherwise it looks as
though everything is running correctly!

Cheers,

Andrew

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Torben Hoffmann <
torben.lehoff@REDACTED> wrote:

> Off the top of my head...
>
> Are you registering the processes with a unique identifier?
> If so you will run into a memory leak as those atoms are not garbage
> collected.
>
> You could also have an issue with the number of processes you spawn -
> unless you specify +P <number> you are limited to maximum
> number-I-cannot-remember-right-now processes.
>
> What is "pretty quickly" anyway?
>
> Cheers,
> Torben
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 3:10 PM, andrew mmc <andrewmmc@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> Hello, all,
>> I have a system that involves spawning lots of processes to work on the
>> same set of data.  Each process reports to one of a number of listener
>> processes that collate the results and determines the next bit of work to
>> do.  There is also a fair amount of inter-process communication.  I have
>> found that pretty quickly, erlang runs out of memory.
>>
>> What is the best way to find out what is going on and what the cause of
>> this leak is?
>>
>> Thanks for your help,
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> erlang-questions mailing list
>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
>> http://www.erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20090526/6775e824/attachment.htm>


More information about the erlang-questions mailing list