Erlang does not have a common runtime for its processes? What happens to the isolated Erlang processes when the VM fails to allocate more memory from the OS? Does the whole VM crash, or just the process that caused the memory allocation attempt?
That is one of the few cases that will take down the whole VM (at least, as of a few versions ago). Due to Erlang's concept of process isolation, there's not really a sensible course of action for the VM to take if it runs out of memory. Maybe just killing the individual process or running a GC pass on every process and trying again might be a better approach than hosing the whole runtime, maybe they've fixed it. Either way, the frequency with which this happens in production Erlang apps seems to be low enough that it's essentially a non-issue for most of the Erlang community.
> What happens to the isolated Erlang processes when the VM fails to allocate more memory from the OS?
It suspends your process, then logs into newegg.com and buys more memory sticks for your sever. You know it is just a regular VM and doesn't have magic in it. If you use up all the memory on your server you are screwed probably.
You could set up a monitor to see which erlang process is eating memory and what rate and then decide what to do, kill the process, restart the whole node, or report someplace.
