[erlang-questions] Fail fast

[Chandru]

Hello everyone,

I've just had a failure in one of my live services because an erlang node
ran out of memory (caused by a traffic spike). Restart mechanisms exist to
restart the node, but the node took a long time to die because it was
writing a large erl_crash.dump file, and then there was a 7GB core dump.

Is there a quicker way to fail? I'm thinking of disabling core dumps
entirely on the box. What else can I do? A configuration option on the node
to only produce a summary erl_crash.dump would be nice. The most useful
things for me in a crash dump usually are the slogan at the top, and the
message queue lengths of each process. In this particular case, the slogan
would've told me all that I needed to know.

Chandru
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