[erlang-questions] Huge binary usage

[Yogish Baliga]

If binary is not used, will that space is reused? Is it possible that the resident memory will grow to a point where VM will crash because of out-of-memory error?

-- baliga


________________________________
From: Robert Virding <rvirding@REDACTED>
To: Yogish Baliga <yogishb@REDACTED>
Cc: Erlang Questions <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
Sent: Thu, October 8, 2009 4:36:49 PM
Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] Huge binary usage

Large binaries are kept in the normal process heaps but outside of them.
This means that they are not collected in the same way as normal data and
can hang around for a longer time, though they will be collected.

Robert

2009/10/9 Yogish Baliga <yogishb@REDACTED>

> I have a erlang process which is running at 376MB Resident memory.
> erlang:memory() shows the following output.
>
> [{total,265245056},
>  {processes,56800140},
>  {processes_used,56777884},
>  {system,208444916},
>  {atom,662173},
>  {atom_used,636586},
>  {binary,178220728},
>  {code,4720224},
>  {ets,21754908}]
>
> Seems like most of the memory is used  by "binary".
>
> Along with this, I did a sum of total memory used by all the processes
> running on the system. It comes to around 53MB (which is same as what is
> reported in processes_used).
>
> Question is how can I find what process(es) allocated the binaries and why
> they are not released?
>
> Thanx,
> -- baliga
>
> "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" --Alan Kay
>
> http://dudefrommangalore.blogspot.com/