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

[Decker, Nils]

Hello,

I had a few occasions during developing that a runaway process caused my machine to swap and gind to a halt. (i should have used ulimit on beam)

I wondered why there is no way to limit the size of a single process. It could be a simple option to spawn to limit the heap size of a process. (like ulimit)
The process gets killed if it ever grows beyond the limit. A limit for the size of the message queue would be nice too, because a process with a few thousand entries is (most of the time) not going to cope with it anyway.
A similar limit for ETS tables would be possible too. A memory limit for shared resources (large binaries) would be more difficult.

Nils Decker