How to analyse a BEAM core dump?

2016-01-26 by Rafal Studnicki

You have your Erlang system running for a long time now and all of a sudden the BEAM process disappears on one of the nodes. In the OS logs you can see that the process was killed because of a segmentation fault, but besides that you have nothing. Obviously, you hadn't been prepared for such a scenario and a core dump of the crashed process wasn't generated. Now, after waiting (too long) for the segmentation fault to occur again, you ended up with a precious core.xxx file. But what's next?