I have an application that displays messages on a website. These messages are shown after performing some calculations using my service. My main question is related to the behavior inside the GenServer. In the GenServer, I make a query to retrieve messages with certain conditions from the database. However, if there is a problem with the database connection or if the database goes down, the message query function may raise an exception.

To handle such situations, I have set the max_restart option to a very high value (e.g., 100000000) in the supervisor configuration. This means that even if the GenServer restarts multiple times due to errors, the supervisor will continue restarting it. This approach helps me handle database connection issues or outages.

However, I would like to know the impact of setting such a high value for max_restart in the supervisor on system performance. Does it affect the system’s overall performance? Additionally, I’m curious to understand what happens to the previous state’s data when the supervisor restarts the GenServer. Furthermore, I have limited knowledge about the inner workings of the Elixir garbage collection process and the Erlang virtual machine (VM).

Please help me clarify these questions as I do not have much experience in low-level system details or extensive knowledge about the Erlang VM.