"no next heap size found: 18446744071789822643, offset 0" - erlang

Question

I've written a simulator, which is distributed over two hosts. When I launch a few thousand processes, after about 10 minutes and half a million events written, my main Erlang (OTP v22) virtual machine crashes with this message:
no next heap size found: 18446744071789822643, offset 0.
It's always that same number - 18446744071789822643.
Because my server is very capable, the crash dump is also huge and I can't view it on my headless server (no WX installed).
Are there any tips on what I can look at?
What would be the first things I can try out to debug this issue?

Answer 1

First, see what memory() says:
> memory().
[{total,18480016},
{processes,4615512},
{processes_used,4614480},
{system,13864504},
{atom,331273},
{atom_used,306525},
{binary,47632},
{code,5625561},
{ets,438056}]
Check which one is growing - processes, binary, ets?
If it's processes, try typing i(). in the Erlang shell while the processes are running. You'll see something like:
Pid Initial Call Heap Reds Msgs
Registered Current Function Stack
<0.0.0> otp_ring0:start/2 233 1263 0
init init:loop/1 2
<0.1.0> erts_code_purger:start/0 233 44 0
erts_code_purger erts_code_purger:wait_for_request 0
<0.2.0> erts_literal_area_collector:start 233 9 0
erts_literal_area_collector:msg_l 5
<0.3.0> erts_dirty_process_signal_handler 233 128 0
erts_dirty_process_signal_handler 2
<0.4.0> erts_dirty_process_signal_handler 233 9 0
erts_dirty_process_signal_handler 2
<0.5.0> erts_dirty_process_signal_handler 233 9 0
erts_dirty_process_signal_handler 2
<0.8.0> erlang:apply/2 6772 238183 0
erl_prim_loader erl_prim_loader:loop/3 5
Look for a process with a very big heap, and that's where you'd start looking for a memory leak.
(If you weren't running headless, I'd suggest starting Observer with observer:start(), and look at what's happening in the Erlang node.)