I’ve got some requests misbehaving, and processes handling them suddenly allocate a lot of memory, which can crash my Beam VM. I can monitor and detect that, I can also enforce max memory usage by process, that’s not an issue. I would like to, however, know what is eating up the memory. Ideally I’…

That can come in handy although I don’t think it actually does what I want. I think you can do similar thing from observer if you sort processes by memory, but this is cool to have this in case Erlang on the server has no X support.

You can run observer locally and connect to a remote node to view its information. Here’s a blog post about it: Using Erlang Observer on a Remote Elixir Server - Josh Bavari's Thoughts

Alternatively, have a look at observer cli . Its a terminal version of observer which is fantastic when no X is available (and actually for many cases I prefer its interface over the graphical observer anyways).

But to respond to both of you and @axelson , this won’t help me when I precisely know which process is consuming the memory? I would like to know what is consuming the memory, and unless I am missing some functionality, observer does not allow me to have insignt into what’s in the memory itself

:etop does tell you about the memory consumption of a process. Problem though: If it is not the processes heap + stack but some references to the bin-heap, then you are lost. Space-Leaks on the bin heap are hard to debug due to its ref-counting nature. And even a single "a" which was produced by sl…

Do you mean that etop gives me insight into memory consumption of the process (which it does) or can I also get insight into what consumes the memory? I can’t find the later

It tells you only how much memory is consumed by a process. I doubt there will be anything that tells you the actual what.

Alright. The closest thing to what I want to do would be crashing the Erlang VM and producing a dump file that I could analyse but that’s pretty scary thing to do on a production environment, also the resulting dump will not be scoped to the process I identified but to the whole VM (which can be a g…

There are a few things you can do. Observer (and observer_cli) allow you to inspect what processes are currently doing. In observer_cli, if you ordered the processes by memory usage and you want to inspect the first one, simply press 1. You can then, for example, inspect the messages of the process …

[image] hubertlepicki: The closest thing to what I want to do would be crashing the Erlang VM I would say, this is never necessary if you already know which process is causing the issue. As mentioned above, you can first start digging into the exact process. One thing to also look into, is ga…

Profiling memory usage in given process

Questions & Help Questions

garazdawi March 19, 2019, 8:29am 23

Why not use tracing for this? Seems like a perfect fit.