[erlang-questions] Creating a diagnostic memory dump of live erlang VM

[Geoff Cant]

I would love it if erl_crash.dump was written in the external term format. We started working on an erlang parser library for the existing text format at Heroku, but it's annoying work and I'm lazy.

I would offer someone a holiday-card-of-their-choice to do it, but I'm behind on sending Fred and Steve theirs for last year. :)

--
Geoff Cant

On 2014-02-20, at 01:30 , Vlad Dumitrescu <vladdu55@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 9:26 AM, Anton Lebedevich <mabrek@REDACTED> wrote:
> Another thing which I missed a lot after converting from java to erlang
> is a thread dump. It turned out that it's possible to get all
> stacktraces for all processes (even with function arguments) via
> erlang:system_info(procs).
> 
> It returns them as text so it's better to dump it to file immediately:
> file:write_file("/tmp/procs.txt",erlang:system_info(procs)).
> 
> Format of these traces is quite interesting (undocumented) the best
> description I found is in the mailing list
> http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2012-November/070609.html
> 
> I might just as well ask the obvious question: why is not this information available even as normal Erlang terms, so that one doesn't need to parse it? When writing a crash dump, it doesn't matter, but if it should be used at runtime it's a pain to parse it... This applies to the other results from system_info/1 that are dumped as text.
> 
> regards,
> Vlad