BEAM VM Under the Hood

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.

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.

Prerequisites: Experience in developing and supporting languages running on the BEAM, including Erlang and Elixir.