[erlang-questions] Garbage collection

Salikhov Dinislam Dinislam.Salikhov@REDACTED
Mon Dec 19 13:29:18 CET 2016


Hello!

I've got a couple of questions about garbage collection:
1. AFAIU, a process's heap is garbage collected when the process is 
executed. A process creates and destroys new objects and when there is 
no enough room for the new object in the heap, GC is invoked.
When the process is in scheduler's wait queue, then no new objects are 
created, so GC isn't called.
The only exception, I see, is when new messages are sent to suspended 
process: they are to be kept in receiver's heap and it may lead to GC 
invoked.
Is my understanding correct? Or there are other possibilities to GC 
suspended process?

2. In OTP-19.2 sources, erts/emulator/beam/erl_gc.c:sweep_off_heap() may 
reallocate ProcBins including the struct binary they point to. The list 
of ProcBins to realloc is received in link_live_proc_bin(). What 
prevents us to reallocate the binary that may be referenced by another 
process?

Salikhov Dinislam



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