Inside memory management on the BEAM

The BEAM was designed for 1980s hardware and to never crash, yet it manages to run for a long time on machines with little memory while keeping good soft-real-time performance. This talk introduces the foundations — generational garbage collection, heap structures, and stack mechanics — and then shows experienced developers how to monitor memory usage through BEAM tracing module garbage-collection events and how to optimise applications in memory-constrained environments such as IoT devices.