I’m not sure if binary reference is released on every GC though. Erlang docs state that fullsweep_after should be set to 0 If binaries that are no longer used are to be thrown away as soon as possible. So it seems that binaries are released only on fullsweep (which is by default after 65535 GCs), so even if the heap is small, the binary could be released much later. That’s just my theory though, didn’t really try it out 
sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
3
dominicletz
Creator of Elixir Desktop
Bit late but another useful new feature to start your gen_server with the hibernate_after option, such as:
{:ok, worker} = GenServer.start_link(module, args, hibernate_after: 5_000)
This will ensure that once your worker is bored for more than 5 seconds it will garbage collect everything it can.
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