Debugging Erlang heart timeouts

Question

I use the heart program to restart an Erlang node when it becomes unresponsive. However, I am finding it hard to understand why the node freezes. SASL logs don't show any errors, and my own logs don't seem to show anything remarkable happening at those times. Can anybody give advice on debugging this sort of thing?

Answer 1

By default the heart program issues a SIGKILL to kill off the unresponsive VM so it can quickly start a new one. This makes getting any useful information about the VM pretty much impossible. Something I've tried in the past is to patch the heart program to avoid the hard kill and instead get the VM to create a crash dump and a coredump. I used a patch like this (this one is for Erlang/OTP R14B02):

--- erts/etc/common/heart.c.orig 2011-04-17 12:11:24.000000000 -0400
+++ erts/etc/common/heart.c 2011-04-17 12:12:36.000000000 -0400
@@ -559,10 +559,11 @@
     int res;
     if(heart_beat_kill_pid != 0){
    pid = (pid_t) heart_beat_kill_pid;
-   res = kill(pid,SIGKILL);
+   res = kill(pid,SIGUSR1);
+   sleep(4);
    for(i=0; i < 5 && res == 0; ++i){
        sleep(1);
-       res = kill(pid,SIGKILL);
+       res = kill(pid,i < 2 ? SIGQUIT : SIGKILL);
    }
    if(errno != ESRCH){
        print_error("Unable to kill old process, "

As you can see, with this patch heart will first issue a SIGUSR1 to try to get the VM to create a crash dump. Since this can take awhile, heart then sleeps for 4 seconds. You might have to increase this sleep time if you're not getting full crash dumps. After that, heart then tries twice to issue a SIGQUIT with the hope of getting a coredump, and if that fails, issues a SIGKILL.

Note that this patch will slow down heart's VM restart due to the time required to wait for the crash dumps and coredumps. If you use it in production, be aware of this limitation.