Erlang Garbage Collection Details and Why They Matter

I would expect this kind of article to start with numbers showing that Erlang's GC has shorter GC pauses than, say, Java or Go and then explain why this is so. Instead it merely states that Erlang GC has better latency than other system and we're supposed to just believe it. It's fine as a description of how Erlang GC works but totally useless as an argument that Erlang has short GC pauses.

> *Even if we are using a language that manages memory itself like Erlang, nothing prevents us from understanding how memory is allocated and deallocated. Unlike Go Language Memory Model Documentation Page that advices “If you must read the rest of this document to understand the behavior of your program, you are being too clever. Don’t be clever.”, I believe that we must be clever enough to make our system faster and safer, and sometimes it doesn’t happen unless we…

Very nice article. Good resource for memory handling in Erlang. There is recent config setting since 19.0 to move the message queue outside the main process heap. I have seen decent performance gains from that. Sometimes for fun I like to describe a running Erlang VM as a modern os - processes have isolated heaps and can be gc-ed independently. Then think about programing in a language with a shared heap and it is a bit like putting that mission…