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path: root/erts/preloaded/src/persistent_term.erl
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2019-02-14Add persistent_term:get(Key, DefaultValue)Björn Gustavsson
https://bugs.erlang.org/browse/ERL-843
2018-11-06Add a persistent term storageBjörn Gustavsson
Persistent terms are useful for storing Erlang terms that are never or infrequently updated. They have the following advantages: * Constant time access. A persistent term is not copied when it is looked up. The constant factor is lower than for ETS, and no locks are taken when looking up a term. * Persistent terms are not copied in garbage collections. * There is only ever one copy of a persistent term (until it is deleted). That makes them useful for storing configuration data that needs to be easily accessible by all processes. Persistent terms have the following drawbacks: * Updates are expensive. The hash table holding the keys for the persistent terms are updated whenever a persistent term is added, updated or deleted. * Updating or deleting a persistent term triggers a "global GC", which will schedule a heap scan of all processes to search the heap of all processes for the deleted term. If a process still holds a reference to the deleted term, the process will be garbage collected and the term copied to the heap of the process. This global GC can make the system less responsive for some time. Three BIFs (implemented in C in the emulator) is the entire interface to the persistent term functionality: * put(Key, Value) to store a persistent term. * get(Key) to look up a persistent term. * erase(Key) to delete a persistent term. There are also two additional BIFs to obtain information about persistent terms: * info() to return a map with information about persistent terms. * get() to return a list of a {Key,Value} tuples for all persistent terms. (The values are not copied.)