hubertlepicki
I’ve got some requests misbehaving, and processes handling them suddenly allocate a lot of memory, which can crash my Beam VM.
I can monitor and detect that, I can also enforce max memory usage by process, that’s not an issue.
I would like to, however, know what is eating up the memory. Ideally I’d be able to take a snapshot of memory used by current process, have it dumped to a file that contains Erlang terms, which later I could analyse and find out what’s on stack, what’s on heap etc.
Is there something out there I can use to achieve that?
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Fl4m3Ph03n1x
A few things occur to me as to why that may be happening:
castthem out!Are you using
cast?We had an issue sometime ago where we were flooding a process with messages via cast, which caused its mailbox to grow indefinitely causing it to crash the BEAM VM.
queues
Using queues?
Queues that grow without boundary (looking at you hackney) misbehave spectacularly, consuming all the system’s memory until a crash is inevitable.
Tools you can use
If you want a specific tool, then I know of erlyberly, which shows you memory and messages passed between processes.
You can also find other tools in this discussion:
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sasajuric
The stack trace should help you narrow down the problematic code. We actually had a similar situation recently, and we ended up periodically logging the processes with unusually high mem usage, together with their stack traces. In this particular situation that info was enough to completely understand the root cause. I agree that it’s not quite what you’re looking for, but it can help you in understanding the problem.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that in a general case excessive mem usage can be caused by other things, such as messages accumulated in the process queue, or refc binaries, or ets tables, so finding the cause is not necessarily as straightforward as logging the current heap of the process, which is why I mentioned a couple of different things in my previous answer.
garazdawi
That is true. However, since you cannot loop without calling functions I’ve very rarely found that to be a limiting factor.
axelson
You can run observer locally and connect to a remote node to view its information. Here’s a blog post about it: Using Erlang Observer on a Remote Elixir Server - Josh Bavari's Thoughts