[erlang-questions] Need help understanding why the error_logger is growing to gigabytes of memory even when idle

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Oct 17, 2012, at 5:00 AM, Kris Rasmussen <kris@REDACTED> wrote:

> Michael, thanks for the quick reply. We have not changed the priority of our processes. It's probably also worth including this output since it seems to imply that binaries are not the culprit as we originally suspected:
> 

Another question: Do you have processes with lots of in-heap state? When such processes crash, they may
want to print out their state and this in turn overloads the error_logger. There are two ways around this problem:

1. Use lager. Lager can limit the amount of data logged.
2. Use the Module:format_status/3 callback in affected large gen_servers (and like functions in other places).
  This can in turn limit down the amount of data in the print-out since you can throw it away. Of course doing so might make it impossible to figure out what went wrong when an error occurs, so one might need to think about
what to throw away.

Jesper Louis Andersen
  Erlang Solutions Ltd., Copenhagen