[erlang-questions] Proposal: process_info(Pid, start_time)

[Danil Zagoskin]

Hi!

TL;DR: Would you like to know when any process was started in little cost
of memory usage on 32-bit systems and crashdump generation speed?

Sometimes we have to inspect long-running systems.
And if a complex enough system runs for a month, it's hard to answer these
questions:
 - Process A should run at most 1 hour. Did it stall a week ago?
 - Process B is supervised and it's not good when it restarts. Did it
restart last night?
 - Did process C exist when process D was started?
 - Was pid E reused by a new process since it was stored in ETS?

To answer that questions we need a process start time to be stored
somewhere.
Given that almost every project uses third-party libraries with their own
processes, the universal solution could be having process start time
available in process_info.

It turned out that ERTS already have a process start time, used by a
crashdump writer.

I proposed a PR exposing that value in process_info:
https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/1597
It's very simple — just return a value we already have.

But as Rickard Green noticed, it's better to have this time as Erlang
monotonic time instead of system seconds in current implementation.
This will slightly increase memory consumption on 32-bit systems and
slightly slow down crashdump generation.

The other option Rickard proposed is to remove that timestamp completely
and save some memory.


So, the questions are:

 - Do you find process_info(Pid, start_time) useful and worth 4
bytes/process on 32 bit systems?
 - Do you find process start time in a crashdump useful?

-- 
Danil Zagoskin | z@REDACTED
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20171009/1d7f9d09/attachment.htm>