[erlang-questions] max timeout

[Matthias Lang]

On Monday, August 18, Serge Aleynikov wrote:

> For some reason I have a vague recollection (that may very well be 
> wrong) that when this subject was discussed on the list before the 
> actual timeout number was less then 2^32...  I have a case when I need 
> to put a process to sleep for up to a couple of days (e.g. not to run on 
> a weekend) - in practice I am doing a loop sleep with a smaller timeout 
> to compensate for time drifts and clock adjustments, but nevertheless 
> this question came up about a practical upper bound.

This may be the thread you remember, it starts here:

  http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-February/032609.html

Executive summary: In R11B-2, a timeout of 16#ffffFFFF doesn't work as
    expected on a 32-bit machine. Something changed between R11B-2 and
    R11B-5 which made it work in the shell, but still not in compiled
    code. I haven't noticed anything in the release notes saying it's
    been fixed for real.

Matt