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Our Erlang gateways were developed and deployed in phases starting with AIM/ICQ, GTalk, Yahoo, and finally MSN. Aside from minor protocol implementation bugs there were no problems and we were very satisfied with stability and performance. However, not long after releasing the MSN gateway we noticed that it used a ton of memory, and also periodically suffered massive spikes in memory use which invoked the Linux kernel's OOM killer. This lead to a crash course in debugging running Erlang apps, and a great appreciation for the years of real-world lessons that have influenced the features and design of Erlang/OTP.