Everything you wanted to know about the BEAM but were afraid to ask! Through examples and hands-on exercises, we will showcase how to manage the BEAM VM in operational environments, optimising for memory utilisation and performance when using Erlang or Elixir.
PREREQUISITES Experience in developing and supporting languages running on the Beam, including Erlang and Elixir.
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
Objectives Understand how the BEAM works under the hood. See the variety of tools and controls allowing to fine-tune it and optimise its settings for throughput and memory use.