Mnesia adding 1,000,000 records, core dump

[Casper]

Thanks to all who enlighten me! It's clear now.



-----Original Message-----
From: Matthias [mailto:matthias@REDACTED] On Behalf Of Matthias Lang
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 3:28 PM
To: Casper
Cc: erlang-questions@REDACTED
Subject: RE: Mnesia adding 1,000,000 records, core dump

Casper writes:

 > Thanks a lot for the advice. What discussed in the email you pointed is
like
 > Greek to me. Will try to understand.

The mail I provided a link to is only of interest if you're wondering
"is it really necessary for an Erlang implementation to have a finite
atom table, and is it really so hard to GC that table?"

If you're just interested in writing programs that work, it suffices
to know that

  - in general, don't use 'list_to_atom'. (There are few legitimate 
    uses outside of debugging, it probably wouldn't hurt for the
    documentation to say something along those lines.)

  - it general, if something is a string (list), you should store it 
    as a string (list)

  - the current Erlang implementation has a limit to the number of
    atoms you can have. That limit is high enough so that this will
    only cause problems if you're doing strange things, such as
    creating atoms dynamically with 'list_to_atom'.

Matt