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Yes mostly; when you get a failed allocation, for the most part there is nothing reasonable to do other than make a nice crash dump. Especially from the point of view of a language/toolkit.

As a operator/user, you can certainly write some code to scan for large processes, and kill them; with a fair bit of success, but that's not a great thing for the toolkit to do, it doesn't have a good way to tell what's too big or what's intended.



Nowadays in Erlang you can set a memory limit per process[1], ensuring they get killed if they try to allocate more. Of course you still have to estimate how much is reasonable which isn’t always obvious...

[1] See max_heap_size under http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-9.0/erts-9.0/doc/html/er...




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