We [talko.com] Learned Us Some Erlang

Many (most?) Erlang developers use powerful tracing tools for debugging instead of the debugger, etc. These are built on top of Erlang's native tracing capabilities, but provide rate-limiting, filtering options, nicer formatting, etc. They allow one to probe running systems without having to make code-changes -- an advantage over printf debugging, esp. when dealing w/systems in production.

Until recently, the tool for this was redbug [0] (which is still used); within the last year or so, a newer tool called recon [1] came out, which provides similar tracing functionality [2] as well as some additional features, including being able to look at memory usage [3], which might help with the issue raised in the piece.

Recon was written by Fred Hebert's, author of Learn You Some Erlang and also the author of the free intermediate/advanced book, Erlang in Anger [4], which describes dealing with issues in production, including memory issues -- he also created the recon demo [5] program described in this book that one can use to learn the tool -- there are some suggested exercises in the book.

[0] http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/tracing-erlang-p...

[1] https://ferd.github.io/recon/

[2] https://ferd.github.io/recon/recon_trace.html

[3] https://ferd.github.io/recon/recon_alloc.html

[4] http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/

[5] https://github.com/ferd/recon_demo