Towards online profiling of Erlang systems

Recent releases of Erlang/OTP introduced features, which can be used to improve profiling tools for systems executed on the BEAM virtual machine. We discuss the need to introduce improvements into profiling tools with the Erlang-style concurrency in mind, so that they can help to understand performance of message passing and utilization of processes. We propose a new approach to implementation of the crucial element of such tools: the concurrent counters updates mechanism. To demonstrate the limitations of current tools in this area and verify the proposed approach, we present the results of a synthetic benchmark. The results clearly show that the proposed approach is a step towards a new generation of online profiling tools.