Through examples and hands on exercises, we will showcase how to manage the BEAM VM in operational environments, optimizing for memory utilisation and performance when using Erlang or Elixir.
OBJECTIVES
Understand how the BEAM works under the hood.
PREREQUISITES
Experience in developing and supporting languages running on the Beam, including Erlang and Elixir.
Fine-tune it and optimize its settings for throughput and memory use.
TARGET AUDIENCE
The course is aimed at experienced developers and devops engineers, helping them pre-empt and address behaviour which arise as the result of VM specific settings, be it disruption of soft real time properties as a result of garbage collection or bottlenecks in the scheduler.
COURSE OUTLINE
Intro to the BEAM - highlights of the BEAM Virtual Machine, the features which make it stand out in comparison to other VMs.
Processes under the hood - how memory is allocated, managed and garbage collected.
The Process Scheduler - how the schedulers works, how it scales on multi-core architectures and what its limitations are.
Memory Management - different memory types including system, atom, binary, code and ets tables.
Tweaking and fine-tuning - tweaks and possible fine-tuning