[weatherlight]

I thought Erlang's Garbage collector was incremental by virtue of being per process. A system may have tens of thousands of processes, using a gigabyte of memory overall, but if GC occurs in a process with a 20K heap, then the collector only touches that 20K and collection time is imperceptible. With lots of small processes, you can think of this as a truly incremental collector.

It's not incremental per process, but I'm not sure it would even matter that much in practice.

[dmpk2k]

Yes, that is how it works, except (as you implicitly note) that large heaps in single processes can cause problems; allowing incremental collection per heap would flatten the latency profile further.

[ramchip]

Large GC jobs get scheduled on dirty schedulers today (a background thread pool), since it's not OK to block a normal scheduler more than 1ms or so in Erlang. If they could be split into smaller chunks of work, perhaps it could be done on normal schedulers, making time allocation more fair.