[erlang-questions] automatic garbage collection when low memory?

[Roger Price]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Convey Christian J NPRI wrote:

> I've got a program that crashes unless I explicitly call 
> erlang:garbage_collect() at certain points.  I'm pretty sure the problem 
> is that I'm running out of memory simply because the garbage collector 
> isn't running often enough.

> Does anyone know if there's a way to get Erlang to run the garbage 
> collector when memory gets tight?

I don't know if this is relevant, but I once wrote a front end to Erlang 
which generated wierd Erlang programs.  They typically ran 3000 identical 
processes each emulating a pi-calculus path. Each process ran for just a 
few milliseconds.  This pi-calculus emulator thrashed and got nowhere 
until I set

   erlang:system_flag(fullsweep_after,0).

I don't know if the problem was memory based, but this fixed it, and the 
emulator then ran well.

Roger Price