[rabbitmq-discuss] behavior when erlang processes exhausted

Wed May 25 22:02:40 BST 2011

Aaron,

Aaron Westendorf wrote:
> What is the expected behavior of Rabbit when Erlang runs out of 
> processes?

Bad things happen.

> We had an event over the past weekend that went something like this:
> 
> =ERROR REPORT==== 22-May-2011::17:35:58 === Too many processes
> 
> This continued for many hours.

That's bad.

> Rabbit is configured with 1048576 procs and with mid-day load is
> reporting 595400 in use.

There are very few things in rabbit that use up processes. Queues, 
connections and channels being the main ones. Do you expect high numbers 
of these in your application? If yes then there is no harm in raising 
the process limit except for an increased initial memory footprint. If 
no then you may want to have a look at the state of your system with 
'rabbitmqctl list_*' to determine what kind of resource is showing an 
unexpectedly high count.

Regards,

Matthias.