Not an expert, but this might help perhaps :
!!WARNING!!
We must be careful not to accidentally load invalid state into our processes. For example, if the state of a process changes between deploys, then you might load invalid state and cause your process to crash. Here are some other things to look out for:
- loading stale data
- loading data fails, causing process to crash
- there is no data to load, causing process to crash
Anytime we are loading state into our processes from an external source, we should be very careful. Erlang’s “let it crash” philosophy is predicated on the idea that a process will be in a known good state after a restart, and if we subvert this by loading invalid state, it could have a negative impact on the stability of our system.
