Erlang: Overhead of booting Erlang VM

Wanted to measure the overhead of booting an Erlang virtual machine, do nothing and shut it down.

These measurements are on 2Ghz Core-2 Duo desktop machine running ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

$ /usr/bin/time -p erl -noinput -noshell -s init stop
real 1.13
user 0.14
sys 0.01

Looks like it takes about 1.130 Seconds - this includes both booting and shutdown times. init:stop/0 is the proper way to shutdown Erlang virtual machine and we don’t really know where most of the time went, whether in booting the VM or to shutdown the VM. To figure this out let us try using another method,

$ /usr/bin/time -p erl -noinput -noshell -s erlang halt
real 0.14
user 0.13
sys 0.01

erlang:halt/0 abruptly shutdowns the VM, the above numbers give us an idea on how-long it takes to boot Erlang-Virtual-Machine.