if you're eg experiencing a timeout because your code is calling another service that isn't responding, you can shut down that calling process and restart it all you want, it's not going to really fix the problem, you still need to address why that other service isn't responding? (though it may prevent the VM from being eaten up exclusively by waiting for responses that will never come - is that the idea?)
Erlang is fault tolerant with the following things in mind:
- Erlang knows that errors WILL happen, and things will break, so instead of guarding against errors, Erlang lets you have strong tools to minimize impact of errors and recover from them as they happen.
- Erlang encourages you to program for success case, and crash if anything goes wrong without trying to recover partially broken data. The idea behind this is that partially incorrect data may propagate further in your system and may get written to database, and thus presents risk to your system. Better to get rid of it early and only keep fully correct data.
- Process isolation in Erlang helps with minimizing impact of partially wrong data when it appears and then leads to process crash. System cleans up the crashed code and its memory but keeps working as a whole.
- Supervision and restart strategies help keep your system fully functional if parts of it crashed by restarting vital parts of your system and bringing them back into service. If something goes very wrong such that restarts happen too much, the system is considered broken beyond repair and thus is shut down.
I really want to get this but I don't
if you're eg experiencing a timeout because your code is calling another service that isn't responding, you can shut down that calling process and restart it all you want, it's not going to really fix the problem, you still need to address why that other service isn't responding? (though it may prevent the VM from being eaten up exclusively by waiting for responses that will never come - is that the idea?)