Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix

What we’ll do in this chapter

• look at linking process and trapping exits
• examine the strategies for process supervision
• build a custom supervisor
• restore game state after a crash

Chapter 5Process Supervision for Recovery

We all work with computers. We know it’s inevitable that things will go wrong, sometimes really wrong. In spite of our best laid plans, state goes bad, systems raise exceptions, and servers crash. These failures often seem to come out of nowhere, unpredictably and without warning.

To combat these inevitable problems, we need to boost fault tolerance. We need to isolate failures as much as possible, handle them, and have the system as a whole carry on.

Elixir and OTP provide a world-class mechanism for handling problems and moving ...