> "Scheduling is pre-emptive. Regardless of priority, a process is pre-empted when it has consumed more than a certain number of reductions since the last time

> "Scheduling is pre-emptive. Regardless of priority, a process is pre-empted when it has consumed more than a certain number of reductions since the last time it was selected for execution." From the Erlang docs on process priority. The BEAM VM can kill, halt, or suspend a running process at anytime from outside the process. It does not need to wait around for the process to exceed its reduction count limit. Some of this capability is even exposed to user-land applications. The exit/2 function builds on top of this capability when sending in th atom 'kill' as the second argument. As do the suspend_process/1, suspend_process/2, and resume_process/1 functions. The reduction count system is just there as a kind of fair-scheduling determinism semantic. Exhausting reduction allocations is not the only way the VM has to interact with running processes.