Multicore profiling for Erlang programs using percept2

Abstract

Erlang is a functional programming language with built-in support for concurrency based on share-nothing processes and asynchronous message passing. The design of Erlang makes it suitable for writing concurrent and parallel applications, taking full advantage of the computing power of modern multicore machines. However many existing Erlang applications are sequential, in need of parallelisation. In this paper, we present the Erlang concurrency profiling tool Percept2,and demonstrate how the information provided by it can help the user to explore the potential parallelism in an Erlang application and how the system performs on the Erlang multicore system. Percept2 thus allows users improve the performance and scalability of their applications.