&gt; I guess this is mostly due to memory leaks or bit rot.<p>&quot;Bit rot&quot;? The only defense for the bit rot I&#x27;m aware of is ECC RAM.<p>Anyway. AFAIK (and I&#x27;m no Erlang expert, so there&#x27;s probably something pertinent that I don&#x27;t know) unless there&#x27;s a resource leak in core Erlang code, resource leaks can be fixed by restarting the leaking application, or killing the leaking process. [0]<p>[0] Erlang software is often broken up into Applications. [1] An application is a collection of code with a well-known entry point that (ideally) does a particular thing. An application can depend on other applications and the services that they provide. Applications <i>can</i> be started and stopped independently of all others in the system, but -in order to keep running- dependant applications need to be designed to handle the temporary absence of an application that they depend on.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnyousomeerlang.com&#x2F;building-applications-with-otp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnyousomeerlang.com&#x2F;building-applications-with-otp</a>