How to see the running processes in erlang shell

Erlang provides a built-in utility called etop, that is same as standard top utility on Unix. Instead of monitoring processes on the operating system, etop show the current running/active Erlang processes. By default it starts a GUI window to show the processes running. Sometimes GUI is not desirable especially when the Erlang shell is running on production servers. Documentation does not show any way to start etop in text mode. Here is how to run it

etop:start([{output, text}]).

Detecting rejected file upload in PHP code

PHP can be configured to reject the file uploads exceeding some limit via upload_max_filesize server configuration parameter (in php.ini). As per the documentation here, even though the file upload is rejected, an entry is made in $_FILES array with error code set to UPLOAD_ERR_INI_SIZE. This is documented here.

Practically speaking this is not the case. When the uploaded content size exceed upload_max_filesize, $_FILES array is empty. This array cannot be inspected to find the reason for the error. I found a hack to do this.

* For file uploads, $_SERVER['CONTENT_TYPE'] is always set to multipart/form-data followed by the multipart boundary string.
* $_SERVER['CONTENT_LENGTH'] will be set to the content-length in the http header.

Combination of above 2 can be used to detect the file upload exceeding upload_max_filesize.

if ( stripos( $_SERVER['CONTENT_TYPE'], 'multipart/form-data') === 0 && intval($_SERVER['CONTENT_LENGTH']) > 0 &&
count($_FILES) == 0) {
error_log( 'File upload rejected due to file size exceeding upload_max_filesize limit' );
}

Load balancing in Erlang using pg2 process groups

While working with some project @ my current workplace, we came across a situation where we are using pg2 process group. Apparently pg2 does not load balance across processes registered in the pg2 group. It usually done in round robin way. So it may happen that even though many processes are registered under same group, but all messages will get queues in single process.

My co-worker and I came with an algorithm to solve this. It is describe here.