Elixir in Action, Third Edition

7 Building a concurrent system

This chapter covers

• Working with the Mix project
• Managing multiple to-do lists
• Persisting data
• Reasoning with processes

The concurrent examples you’ve seen so far have relied on a single server process instance. But typical Elixir and Erlang systems are powered by a multitude of processes—many of which are stateful server processes. It’s not uncommon for a moderately complex system to run a few thousand processes, whereas larger systems may be powered by hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of processes. Remember that processes are cheap, so you can create them in abundance. And owing to message-passing concurrency, it’s still fairly easy to reason about highly concurrent systems. Therefore, it’s useful to ...