[erlang-questions] Setting maximum amount of data allocated by an Erlang node.‏

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 6/09/2015, at 12:07 am, Akash Chowdhury <achowdhury918@REDACTED> wrote:

> The use case is that the application is using huge memory. In some occurrences, one node grew until 100GB and the application as well as the box crashed. We would like to setup a limit so that application and box doesn't crash.

Enquiring about total memory or limiting total memory does not seem
like a very helpful thing to do here.  You need to know *where* the
memory is actually going.  If you limit the memory available to that
OS process, it will just make the application crash earlier (but may
save the box); it won't actually fix the performance bug.

In fact this is a much more hopeful case, because Erlang has good
performance monitoring tools, and there is probably a single process
that needs to control its *own* memory usage rather than bothering
about what other processes are doing, and that *is* doable in a
concurrent world.