GenServer the "rabbit hole" — Part 2: The Silent Cascade

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:10:51 -0300

Continuation of GenServer the “rabbit hole”. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend going there first — we’ll start from the same genserver_study project and the same concepts of mailbox, supervisor and max_restarts.

In the previous article we explored how a “misbehaving” GenServer can shut down the whole supervision tree when it bursts the supervisor’s max_restarts. We showed how messages are lost in the mailbox and how “Let it crash” isn’t exactly a blank check to let processes break randomly.

Fault-Tolerance on DanielWS

GenServer the "rabbit hole" — Part 2: The Silent Cascade