Wrapping Up

Completing this chapter was not an easy task, so well done! Learning to use GenServer correctly will open the doors to building highly concurrent and performant applications without the complexity we see in other programming languages. GenServer is a versatile tool, and we’ll reach for it often when doing work concurrently.

GenServer callbacks

In this chapter, we learned about the most common callbacks used when implementing the GenServer behaviour. We learned to use each callback, interact with the process while it’s still running, and use the process state.

Supervisors

We can start processes at runtime using DynamicSupervisor or build our own supervisor when needed.

Use the Registry to manage large processes

Finally, we saw how the Registry can make registering and managing large numbers of running processes a breeze.

Limit concurrency

The last thing we added to our job-processing system was the ability to limit concurrency. This is because running a high volume of concurrent jobs can potentially overwhelm our system, especially when the work requires numerous system resources.

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