How to investigate why Erlang crashed

Questions / Help
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1

Imagine you are greeted with this popup:

image

There is nothing in the application logs and no crash dump. How do you figure out what went wrong? Or do you assume it was an OS issue and get on with your day?

Event Viewer says:

# General
Faulting application name: erl.exe, version: 15.0.1.0, time stamp: 0x668d98f9
Faulting module name: beam.smp.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x668d98f6
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000217d4f
Faulting process id: 0x6638
Faulting application start time: 0x01dae2b072aba2ad
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\AppName\erts-15.0.1\bin\erl.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\AppName\erts-15.0.1\bin\beam.smp.dll
Report Id: 5ba12d59-f819-4c54-97e2-34772ea845d3
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID: 

# Details
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
  <Provider Name="Application Error" /> 
  <EventID Qualifiers="0">1000</EventID> 
  <Level>2</Level> 
  <Task>100</Task> 
  <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> 
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2024-07-30T20:05:01.215327000Z" /> 
  <EventRecordID>940147</EventRecordID> 
  <Channel>Application</Channel> 
  <Computer>ComputerName</Computer> 
  <Security /> 
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Data>erl.exe</Data> 
  <Data>15.0.1.0</Data> 
  <Data>668d98f9</Data> 
  <Data>beam.smp.dll</Data> 
  <Data>0.0.0.0</Data> 
  <Data>668d98f6</Data> 
  <Data>c0000005</Data> 
  <Data>0000000000217d4f</Data> 
  <Data>6638</Data> 
  <Data>01dae2b072aba2ad</Data> 
  <Data>C:\Program Files\AppName\erts-15.0.1\bin\erl.exe</Data> 
  <Data>C:\Program Files\AppName\erts-15.0.1\bin\beam.smp.dll</Data> 
  <Data>5ba12d59-f819-4c54-97e2-34772ea845d3</Data> 
  <Data /> 
  <Data /> 
  </EventData>
  </Event>
2

I’m pretty sure this is an OTP 27.0.1 bug. It was happening on most machines around the time that another application’s log file that I’m tailing is rotated. I’ve rolled back to OTP 25 and the problem has gone away.

Would love to figure out what the issue is though :slight_smile: