Michał Ślaskii

Technical Lead (Erlang Solutions)

AGH graduate, Erlang programmer since 2005. In 2014 began organizing the Lambda Days conference, which focuses on functional languages and new trends in computer science. In the same year also started organizing programming workshops for people who would like to learn languages such as Erlang, Elixir or Swift. Currently a Technical Lead in Erlang Solutions and frequent conference speaker.

Past Activities

Michał Ślaskii
Code BEAM Lite Berlin

Tutorial/ 10 Oct 2019
09.00 - 17.00

The BEAM VM Under The Hood

A guide for operations and development teams.

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, 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 of the VM, looking at some of the most obscure flags which can come in hand, allowing for specific optimisations on a VM level, be it to increase I/O or throughput in virtualised environments.

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