[erlang-questions] Why Beam.smp crashes when memory is over?

[Tony Arcieri]

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Max Lapshin <max.lapshin@REDACTED> wrote:

> I understand your arguments. Yet, It would be great to have
> instrument, that tells supervisor, that child
> is eating too much memory. Look, if we are speaking about reliable
> platform, than it is better to have some
> predictable behaviour.
>

I'm not really sure if we're speaking about the same thing then.  Erlang is
best utilized as a stateless platform, with a "fail early fail often"
philosophy, and crashing the entire interpreter in the event of some
underlying problem with the OS fits that entirely.  You seem to be seeking a
platform that lets you program defensively, handling errors rather than
crashing and restoring with a clean state.  In that regard, Erlang may not
be the best language for you to work with, but then again the problem of
successfully recovering from an out-of-resource condition is an extremely
difficult one to handle well without scrapping it all and trying to restart
with a clean state.

I'm not really sure what alternative behavior you're proposing, either?

-- 
Tony Arcieri
Medioh/Nagravision