Briefly, the tradeoff that Erlang and its independent process heaps model make is that garbage collection (and execution in general) occurs per-process. In practical terms, this means you have lots of little garbage collections and much fewer "large" (think "full OS process heap") collections.
This provides value in a few ways:
- conceptually: it is very simple. i.e., the garbage collection of one process is not logically tied to the garbage collection of another.
- practically: it lends itself well to low-latency operations, where the garbage collection of one process is able to happen concurrently to the the normal operation of another process.
Please note that I am not claiming this model is superior to any other. That is of course situational. I am just trying to be informative.
This provides value in a few ways:
- conceptually: it is very simple. i.e., the garbage collection of one process is not logically tied to the garbage collection of another.
- practically: it lends itself well to low-latency operations, where the garbage collection of one process is able to happen concurrently to the the normal operation of another process.
Please note that I am not claiming this model is superior to any other. That is of course situational. I am just trying to be informative.
This is a good post with more information, if you're interested: https://hamidreza-s.github.io/erlang%20garbage%20collection%...