Inside the Erlang Garbage Collector: A Functional Perspective on Concurrency and Memory Management

Erlang’s garbage collector is designed for highly concurrent, fault-tolerant systems with a per-process model that avoids global pauses. Based on Cheney’s 1970 algorithm, it uses semispace copying collection and works without shared memory, ensuring low-latency and efficiency even under massive loads. The BEAM VM implements generational garbage collection since Erlang/OTP R12B, optimizing memory management for both short-lived and long-lived objects. Each process in Erlang runs independently with its own garbage collection cycle, improving performance and scalability.