Elixir Concurrency Model

Process

Processes in Erlang VM are lightweight and run across all CPUs. It’s common to have thousands of concurrent processes in an Elixir application.

A process can be created with spawn/3

Message Passing

Processes rely on message passing to communicate (unlike threads that share resource).

• send/2 sends message to pid
• receive match message and has the same format as case do ... end in elixir

If you send a message that does not match any pattern defined in the receive function, the message will linger in the mailbox. While sending a message that gets through the pattern matching but creates an error will halt the process where the error occurred.

Process Linking

spawn_link/3 creates a process and links it to the current process. When a process fails, it sends a tuple explanation to other processes that are linked to it.

Process Monitoring

spawn_monitor/3 is used when we want to get information of a process without linking two processes together.