I wouldn't have expected this much dependence on global state in erlang software. I thought erlang was all about encapsulation, but I guess some problems are basically universal to production software no matter what language you use, and global state is one of them
this sounds suspicious. bits of code are going to be walking the whole process tree looking for something that is not going to be there when the code is running in production. i guess the operation is relatively inexpensive so maybe it is ok.