[erlang-questions] Associating contextual info with monitors

[Ulf Wiger]

No, terminate() is always called, if possible. If the server isn't
trapping exits, the server may die without being able to do any
cleanup.

BR,
Ulf W

2008/2/20, Dave Peticolas <dave@REDACTED>:
> Rick Pettit wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 07:52:56PM -0700, Dave Smith wrote:
> >> Greetings,
> >>
> >> On several occasions, I've found myself wanting to be able to do some
> >> cleanup (e.g. remove an entry in ets) when a process dies. Usually I
> >> solve this by maintaining an ets table keyed by pid, that stores the
> >> necessary contextual info needed for cleanup, and then setup a monitor
> >> on the pid of interest. This works ok, but it's a little annoying to
> >> need to maintain yet another ets table for this context info that is
> >> only used when the process dies. It seems like what I _really_ want is
> >> a way to associate a term with a monitor -- that way when I get the
> >> DOWN message, I would also get the associated term and have everything
> >> I need to do the cleanup.
> >>
> >> Is there a "Right Way" to accomplish this? Maintaining ets tables for
> >> this sort of contextual info seems a bit overkill -- is there a
> >> simpler approach? Has anyone else ever encountered this sort of issue?
> >> I tried searching through the archives for this problem, but couldn't
> >> find the right set of search terms. :)
> >
> > The way I typically solve this problem is by putting the cleanup code in
> > a gen_server:terminate/2 callback (this way when the gen_server dies it
> > cleans up after itself).
>
> Now I thought that terminate/2 is only called when a gen_server requests
> a stop from a callback function (by returning {stop, ...}), but not when
> it dies from, say, an exception. Is that not right?
>
>
> > For instances where the processes being spawned aren't gen_* servers, I
> would
> > most likely spawn a wrapper process which in turn spawn_links the real
> child
> > process, then blocks forever waiting to receive the EXIT for that process
> (the
> > cleanup code is triggered upon receipt of the EXIT, then the wrapper
> process
> > itself terminates).
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