[erlang-questions] Fail fast

[Chandru]

On 21 December 2011 11:13, Richard Carlsson <carlsson.richard@REDACTED>wrote:

> On 2011-12-21 03:23, Chandru wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
> Apart from limiting the size of core dumps in the OS, you can set the
> ERL_CRASH_DUMP* environment variables described at the bottom of the
> manual page for erl (http://www.erlang.org/doc/**man/erl.html<http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erl.html>)
> to get some control over the Erlang crash dumps.
>
>
That is very useful, thank you. I wasn't aware of that option.

cheers
Chandru
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