I think there is a bit of information left out here (presumably because it is assumed to be understood by the reader), but it is not uncommon for erlang applica

I think there is a bit of information left out here (presumably because it is assumed to be understood by the reader), but it is not uncommon for erlang applications to have millions of different processes active at the same time. As such, since memory management is (mostly) isolated within a single process, you have a de-facto sharded garbage collector. This, as the article explains, is a core trait that helps with the soft realtime guarantees erlang brings.