Memory consumption and memory management: How does it work ?

[Matthias Lang]

Mickael Remond writes:

 > - Do you have advice to locate where the memory problem comes from ? I
 > suspect that the problem comes from C driver, but would like to isolate
 > the problem.

Turn the C driver into a port program, temporarily.
Use the instrumented runtime (see below).

 > - On another side, calling garbage_collect reduce notably the memory
 > footprint. The application memory occupation is still growing constantly
 > but, garbage_collect free nearly a quarter of the memory (100 Mo). Is
 > this an indicator that the memory allocation strategy should be changed
 > ? Does this lead you to some interesting advices ?

Continuous growth is a bad sign. Having the garbage collector reclaim a
lot of memory isn't unusual. 

 > - My last questions is about memory analysis: Is it possible to trigger
 > report generation like those of crash dump for precise process analysis ?

Yes:

http://www.erlang.se/doc/doc-5.4.3/lib/tools-2.4/doc/html/instrument.html

Matthias