%% In practice Erlang shouldn't be allowed to grow to more than a half
%% of available memory. The pessimistic scenario is when the Erlang VM
%% has a single process that's consuming all memory. In such a case,
%% during garbage collection, Erlang tries to allocate a huge chunk of
%% continuous memory, which can result in a crash or heavy swapping.
Copied from vm_memory_monitor.erl
So if memory the Erlang process consumed is greater than the free memory of the OS, the Erlang
GC might not work.
%% In practice Erlang shouldn't be allowed to grow to more than a half %% of available memory. The pessimistic scenario is when the Erlang VM %% has a single process that's consuming all memory. In such a case, %% during garbage collection, Erlang tries to allocate a huge chunk of %% continuous memory, which can result in a crash or heavy swapping. Copied from vm_memory_monitor.erl
So if memory the Erlang process consumed is greater than the free memory of the OS, the Erlang GC might not work.
The PR only deals with the Linux OS at present.