[erlang-questions] Terminate process if it is slow at receiving messages

[JD Bothma]

You could tag messages with a timestamp, and each time a client proceses a
message, check difference between the message and current timestamp.

Processes that get more behind than some threshold can close the connection
and exit.

Remember to find the cheap timestamp function - search around here - people
have benchmarked them and explained why some are faster and some are
slower. IIRC it was something to do with guarantees about increasing values
at very high rates on SMP.

Also as mentioned on stack-overflow, ref-counted binaries are held-onto
until all processes which have seen them have GC'd so you might need to
manually GC on long-lived processes every now and then.


On 20 September 2013 17:08, akonsu <akonsu@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have posted this question to stackoverflow (
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18895614/terminate-process-if-it-is-slow-at-receiving-messages)
> and received one helpful response, but I am still not clear about the right
> way to do it.
>
>  I also have seen this thread:
> http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-June/059335.html, which
> is somewhat similar but it still did not hep me.
>
> I would appreciate more help. Here is the question:
>
>
>
> I have a data source process that sends messages to worker processes. To
> keep memory consumption under control, I need to terminate the workers that
> are slow retrieving their messages from their mailboxes.
>
> I am new to Erlang, I would appreciate any pointers. If this is difficult
> to accomplish with Erlang messages, maybe I can use sockets? If so, are
> there examples?
>
> EDIT:
>
> I have a registered process that reads from the web and generates a lot of
> data. It sends these data to all the "subscribed" processes using Erlang
> messages. For each particular piece of data, it sends the same message to
> all subscribers.
>
> I also have a web server that streams the data that the registered process
> reads. So, when a http client connects, the web server creates a process
> and this process subscribes to the registered process and starts receiving
> its messages.
>
> The registered process uses monitors to monitor subscribers. The
> subscribers are controlled by the web server, and when a connection is
> closed, the process that were serving this connection, dies.
>
> There is no acknowledgement, that is, subscribers do not respond when a
> message is sent to them. Although I can program them this way, but I think
> it is too much traffic.
>
> Basically I want to close the connection if a http client is too slow.
>
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>
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