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The BEAM as Your OS

slides/4_beam_is_os.livemd

The BEAM as Your OS

The BEAM as an Operating System

Resource Management

  • Given that you can have many processes running, you can have a whole cohort of “microservices” all running on the same BEAM instance
    • “Phoenix is not your application” - Chris McCord
  • The BEAM acts like an OS and ensures that all processes have a fair time slice on the CPU
    • Processes are preempted after a fair time slice and the next process in the scheduler queue gets a turn
  • After a process is terminated, its memory space is reclaimed

Service Initialization

  • Linux has SystemD…the BEAM has supervisors
    • SystemD controls the lifecycle of services in Linux
    • Supervisors control the lifecycle of processes on the BEAM
  • Supervisors provide the following:
    1. Initialize processes and child supervisors in a deterministic and reproducible order when your application is started
    2. Restart child processes when unrecoverable errors are encountered
    3. Stopping processes in a dependable order when the virtual machine is sent a SIGTERM signal from the operating system

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