If I understood correctly what is happening is that large binaries are not stored in the heap. so the process doesn’t get their heap full and don’t trigger the GC… what ends up keeping the large binaries allocated for a longer perioed of time, by the beam book:
This means that binaries, which has a tendency to be large or even huge, can hang around for a long time after all references to the binary are dead. Note that since binaries are allocated globally, all references from all processes need to be dead, that is all processes that has seen a binary need to do a GC.
The Erlang Runtime System
