[erlang-questions] Question about Erlang's term serialization for message passing

[Christoph Dornheim]

Bjorn Gustavsson <bjorn <at> erix.ericsson.se> writes:

> 
> > I guess the former is true since otherwise message passing would lead to
> > problems such that data possibly needs more memory space in the receiving
> > process than in the sending one (think of sending [L,L] for L=[1,2,3] from
> > process P1 to P2: if something like term_to_binary is used for encoding the
> > received term needs the same space as [L,[1,2,3]] would have been sent).
> 
> Such terms will indeed grow when sent to another process.


Thanks for sharing this information.
Is this (the growth of memory space for received data) just a theoretical
problem of applications sending that kind of data to remote processes or does it
happen sometimes in practice that an application runs out of memory caused by
this problem?