From Ruby to Elixir

Explore Elixir Processes

Processes are the foundation of concurrency in Elixir. They are small, easy to spawn, and you can run as many of them as you have memory for—in production, tens to hundreds of thousands would be normal. You don’t need to know much about the BEAM’s process architecture to use processes, but the details highlight how powerful they are.

In addition to being scalable, processes form the foundation of durable Elixir applications. Processes are able to crash without taking down the rest of the system. This durability is one of the main traits of the BEAM.

We’re going to cover the basics of processes in this section, but we’ll also cover some of the interesting details of the process architecture. You’ll learn how to spawn ...