Erlang Garbage Collection

[Mark Mzyk]

Hey Everyone,

I've recently finished reading several articles on garbage collection in general and a bit on garbage collection in Java.  I was curious if any one knows how Erlang garbage collection works, or where I could potentially find out?  I'm especially curious if Erlang, with it's focus on concurrency, has an special garbage collection issues it has to deal with.

Thanks,

Mark Mzyk
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[orbitz]

The very basics are Erlang either has a per-process heap, so any data  
the process uses is kept in its specific heap, or a hybrid heap which  
has a per-process and global heap for shared data.

The issue with the former is you can have a lot of duplicated data if  
processes are sharing a lot.
The benefit is cleaning up after a process is as simple as destroying  
its heap

The issue with the latter is your GC algorithm has to do more work  
when it is cleaning out the global heap.
The benefit is you are duplicating less data.

This is how things worked a year or so ago AFAIK.

I would imagine, but do not know, that the semantics of erlang might  
make gc'ing a bit easier.  For instance you don't have to worry about  
cycle.

Hopefully someone will have a bit more detail than myself.

On Mar 19, 2008, at 8:34 PM, Mark Mzyk wrote:

> Hey Everyone,
>
> I've recently finished reading several articles on garbage  
> collection in general and a bit on garbage collection in Java.  I  
> was curious if any one knows how Erlang garbage collection works,  
> or where I could potentially find out?  I'm especially curious if  
> Erlang, with it's focus on concurrency, has an special garbage  
> collection issues it has to deal with.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark Mzyk
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@...
> http://www.erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions

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[Mihai Balea]

Hi Mark,

Here's a link to a short and to the point description of how GC works  
in Erlang:

http://prog21.dadgum.com/16.html

If you need more in depth information, you can find a bunch of papers  
on the subject by just using google.

Mihai

On Mar 19, 2008, at 8:34 PM, Mark Mzyk wrote:

> Hey Everyone,
>
> I've recently finished reading several articles on garbage  
> collection in general and a bit on garbage collection in Java.  I  
> was curious if any one knows how Erlang garbage collection works,  
> or where I could potentially find out?  I'm especially curious if  
> Erlang, with it's focus on concurrency, has an special garbage  
> collection issues it has to deal with.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark Mzyk
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@...
> http://www.erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>

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[Richard Carlsson-2]

Mark Mzyk wrote:
> Hey Everyone,
>
> I've recently finished reading several articles on garbage collection
> in general and a bit on garbage collection in Java.  I was curious if
> any one knows how Erlang garbage collection works, or where I could
> potentially find out?  I'm especially curious if Erlang, with it's
> focus on concurrency, has an special garbage collection issues it has
> to deal with.

You'll find several papers on the HiPE site that go into details
about the garbage collection in Erlang (it's not always obvious
from the titles, though).

http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe/publications.shtml

     /Richard
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