ElixirConfEU - Elixir Processes in 3D

I gave a lightning talk at ElixirConfEU on Visualizing Elixir Processes in 3D.

A few nights before travelling to Krakow I had watched a video by Kresten Krab Thorup on his project Erlubi which transmits basic details of the Erlang VM to a Ubigrpah Server.

I started to use this to inspect Erlang projects, and play about with OTP Supervisor trees and how they looked in 3D.

I decided to go about using this from elixir. It doesn’t take much to use from elixir; if you want to visualize your own project simply cherry pick the steps 1, 3, 6 and 7 below.

1 Download the Ubigraph server from ubietylab.net. Unpack it and just run the command line tool bin/ubigraph_server. A black window will appear.

2 Create a new elixir project mix new lightning_ex and cd into directory.

3 Add Erlubi as a dependency to the mix.exs file:

defp deps do
  [{:erlubi, github: "krestenkrab/erlubi"}]
end

4 Add some code to ex_lightning.ex to generate linked and unlinking procs

defmodule ExLightning do
  def start_linked(n) do
    for _ <- 1..n do
      Task.start_link(fn ->
        :timer.sleep(1000)
      end)
    end
  end

  def start(n) do
    for _ <- 1..n do
      Task.start(fn ->
        :timer.sleep(1000)
      end)
    end
  end
end

5 In terminal fetch dependencies and compile with mix do deps.get, compile

6 In terminal start an iex session with mix iex -S mix

7 In iex session start Erlubi tracer with :erlubi_tracer.run. If you get an error ensure you started ubigraph_server as described in step 1. At this point you should see the vanilla elixir system visualized in 3D like so: