[erlang-questions] System limit bringing down rex and the VM

[bile@REDACTED]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 22:42:36 -0500
Paul Fisher <pfisher@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> There is no sane thing that the vm could do in the face of such
> process usage.  Erlang crashes so that you can figure out how to
> correct the design flaw, by looking at the dump.
> 

That's simply false. The sane thing to do is to return an error so the
developer may attempt to handle the situation. There is no flaw.
Hitting the max process limit is not a guaranteed fatal situation and I
should not be kept from attempting to respond it it.

The fact that this happens by chance due to rex and the
supervisor's setup rather than built into the VM totally blows your
argument out of the water. Erlang doesn't crash in the normal sense.
It's not a true fatal error. It could be triggered by calling
rpc:stop(). If it were an actual design decision it should be clearly
documented and part of the base VM behavior... not a side effect of
rex's design.