Introduction to Elixir - Concurrency Primitives, Processes, and Message Passing - Part Eight

[@alittleextra2832]

Thank you... this is the best foundation to build upon.

[@TensorProgramming]

Thanks, glad you found it useful. I hope to add more.

[@jollyjerr]

This was really great! Super clear and well taught

[@josefu-san]

Thanks a lot for this Tensor!

[@Rishabh0501]

Thanks for this video. It's a great learning experience. I have question about the size of the process. Size of the process will change based on the amount of processing, right? Or it will be around 2kb irrespective of the required processing.

[@TensorProgramming]

Each of the processes on the BEAM starts at 2kb and then increases from there based on the data structures that you assign to their heap. They can get pretty large depending on how stateful they are. Fortunately, you have per process garbage collection which you can invoke manually if you really need to. That being said, I've only really had to do this on one app that was pulling millions of timeseries entries from an influxdb. Eventually, I ended up using a process pool for this task and just dumped the process after it was finished instead of using the GC directly. This is also an effective way to keep the processes low in cost; killing them and passing the state off to a new one after minimizing its size. Its almost always useful to treat your elixir/erlang processes as disposable. You can see the process size using the observer and the IEX repl.

[@Rishabh0501]

@@TensorProgramming Thanks a lot Tensor for such a great explanation!

[@TensorProgramming]

@@Rishabh0501 Not a problem. As an amendment to said explanation, each process has its own isolated heap. I kind of implied as much but thats how they can start at 2kb.

[@shadow16810]

Hey Tensor what is that VSCode theme you use with the beautiful symbols for |>,

[@TensorProgramming]

The theme is Spacemacs Dark and the Code ligatures come from a free font called Fira Code which you can download: github.com/tonsky/FiraCode. You will need to enable code ligatures in the settings to the the symbols though.

[@combinedcognitions1905]

best elixir tut

[@juan768]

Beautiful voice!

[@TensorProgramming]

haha thanks.

[@mack_akdas]

Awesome

[@alexa8522]

Is this similar to actor model receiving messages?

[@TensorProgramming]

Its not similar because the BEAM is the original actor model after all. Every time you hear the term process in this video, you can replace it with actor and it would be roughly the same idea. The Elixir language uses processes/actors for everything.

[@alivape]

The Morgan Freeman of programming

[@TensorProgramming]

Not entirely sure what that means haha.

[@anshchaturvedi4235]

@@TensorProgramming I think he's talking about your voice, absolutely lovely! And great video, thanks for this!