This has the unintended consequence of potentially exhausting the atom table on a long-running node, or a node upon which nodetool-backed maintenance activities are run frequently.
This looks fixed on node_package 4.0 and later, including develop. Riak 2.0.8, Riak 2.2.1 and later use 4.0.1, so they no longer exhibit this behavior. There is no safe version of 2.1.x.
When nodetool makes a VM to perform an operation against a running Erlang application, it includes the PID of that specific script invocation:
https://github.com/basho/node_package/blob/develop/priv/base/nodetool#L191
This has the unintended consequence of potentially exhausting the atom table on a long-running node, or a node upon which nodetool-backed maintenance activities are run frequently.