November 16th Monday

-heart Cmd option

 

     Erlang has been started with the -heart Cmd option.  This option causes an OS monitor process to be set up that watches over the Erlang OS process. If the Erlang OS process dies, then Cmd is evaluated. Often Cmd will simply restart the Erlang system.  This is one of the tricks we use when making fault-tolerant nodes if Erlang itself dies (which should never happen), it just gets restarted.  The trick here is to find the heartbeat process (use ps on Unix-like systems and the Task Manager on Windows) and kill it before you kill the Erlang process.

 

Receive

 

  Each process in Erlang has an associated mailbox. When you send a message to the process, the message is put into the mailbox.  The only time the mailbox is examined is when your program evaluates a receive statement:

 

  receive
    Pattern1 [when Guard1] ->
        Expressions1;
    Pattern2 [when Guard1] ->
        Expressions1;
    ...
   after
        Time ->
           ExpressionTimeout
   end

 

  receive works as follows:

 

1. When we enter a receive statement, we start a timer (but only if an after section is present in the expression).
2. Take the first message in the mailbox and try to match it against Pattern1, Pattern2, and so on. If the match succeeds, the message is removed from the mailbox, and the expressions following the pattern are evaluated.
3. If none of the patterns in the receive statement matches the first message in the mailbox, then the first message is removed from the mailbox and put into a “save queue.” The second message in the mailbox is then tried. This procedure is repeated until a matching message is found or until all the messages in the mailbox have been examined.
4. If none of the messages in the mailbox matches, then the process is suspended and will be rescheduled for execution the next time a new message is put in the mailbox. Note that when a new message arrives, the messages in the save queue are not rematched; only the new message is matched.
5. As soon as a message has been matched, then all messages that have been put into the save queue are reentered into the mailbox in the order in which they arrived at the process. If a timer was set, it is cleared.
6. If the timer elapses when we are waiting for a message, then evaluate the expressions ExpressionsTimeout and put any saved messages back into the mailbox in the order in which they arrived at the process.