Analysis of Distributed Systems Dynamics with Erlang Performance Lab

Modern, highly concurrent and large-scale systems require new methods for design, testing and monitoring. Their dynamics and scale require real-time tools, providing a holistic view of the whole system and the ability of showing a more detailed view when needed. Such tools can help identifying the causes of unwanted states, which is hardly possible with static analysis or metrics-based approach. In this paper a new tool for analysis of distributed systems in Erlang is presented. It provides real-time monitoring of system dynamics on different levels of abstraction. The tool has been used for analyzing a large-scale urban traffic simulation system running on a cluster of 20 computing nodes

A Virtual World Distributed Server developed in Erlang as a Tool for analysing Needs of Massively Multiplayer Online Game Servers

At present massively multiplayer online games allow several thousands of players to stay in a single, persistent virtual world. Because of the fast growing interest in this type of servers, we started researching their efficiency and scalability. Our target was an analysis of the MMOG server, which could service up to 1000 players in a single virtual world. We made an assumption that the server will be distributed and running on a dedicated cluster. As the implementation platform we chose Erlang/OTP its main advantages being integration with a distributed database, soft realtime and supporting distributed applications. In this paper we discuss the realisation of the project, and practical aspects of the measurement of server parameters