[erlang-questions] Garbage collection

[Dmytro Lytovchenko]

1. When the process is suspended some external events may happen, such as a
kill signal passed to a process. Its value has to be allocated on the
process heap, so it is possible that GC is invoked.
If i remember right, on heap overflow messages will land in heap fragments.
Next GC will consolidate them into a single new heap.

2. ProcBins are (iirc) onheap binaries <64 bytes. Each larger binary stored
on heap is a reference counted pointer to binary heap. Until refcount is >0
the binary remains locked.

2016-12-19 13:29 GMT+01:00 Salikhov Dinislam <
Dinislam.Salikhov@REDACTED>:

> 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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