May 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Testing with Specs2 and TestKit
Thanks to some feedback was I finally in the position to write up a short piece about how to combine Specs2 with our TestKit. And to properly persist this piece of information, I added it to our docs, so please read more here.
3 tags
Watch the Routees
I answered a question in the Akka mailinglist with example code that might be interesting if you need to do something similar. The use case is to perform a job consisting of a bunch of tasks. Delegate the tasks to worker actors, behind a router. Aggregate the results of workers and reply with one answer. Additionally, a worker should retry failed messages a few times, and then stop. If one worker...
April 2012
4 posts
3 tags
Follow-Up: sbt-assembly now likes reference.conf!
In my last post I said that configuring sbt-assembly to merge our beloved configuration files would not warrant its own plugin. Of course copy-pasting all that code would not have been really that nice either. What a pickle …
Following Mr. Holmes’ logic you will have guessed the solution: big kudos to Eugene for assisting with and merging my patch and releasing sbt-assembly version 0.8.0, which...
3 tags
HOWTO: sbt-assembly vs. reference.conf
One of the things which changed in Akka 2.0 was the new configuration system, which is based upon the assumption that all used settings are defined in resources named “/reference.conf” and found on the classpath. This composes nicely, as then different libraries can coexist in the same project and the configuration systemjust works. One situation where this breaks, however, is when using fat jars...
1 tag
WatchCarl Hewitt explains the essence of the Actor Model of computation.
Brillant. Enjoy.
3 tags
50 million messages per second - on a single...
50 million messages per second on a single machine is mind blowing!
We have measured this for a micro benchmark of Akka 2.0.
As promised in Scalability of Fork Join Pool I will here describe one of the tuning settings that can be used to achieve even higher throughput than the amazing numbers presented previously. Using the same benchmark as in Scalability of Fork Join Pool and only changing the...
March 2012
5 posts
Kindle version of the latest Akka docs
Kindle version of the latest Akka docs: http://download.akka.io/downloads/akka-2.1-SNAPSHOT.mobi
Enjoy.
1 tag
Typesafe Stack 2.0 Released
We are proud to announce that Typesafe Stack 2.0 have been released.
Some of the highlights are:
Akka 2.0
Play 2.0 (and Play Mini)
Getting Started Templates
Found out more about the details on Akka News.
1 tag
Akka - Dr Dobb's Jolt Award Winner
We are very proud to announce that Akka received an honorable mention in the Third Party Libraries category in the Dr Dobb’s Jolt Awards 2012.
Read more here: http://drdobbs.com/joltawards/232601043?pgno=2
1 tag
When to use TypedActors
This is another topic which comes up from time to time on the mailing list: typed actors are “nice”, but some things work differently or not at all, so what exactly are they good for?
Philosophy
As a little historical side-note, typed actors in Akka 1.x were implemented using runtime byte-code generation by the AspectWerkz library, which is no longer actively maintained. Thus, Viktor re-wrote...
1 tag
Akka 2.0 has landed
Finally, after months of hard work, we are proud to announce Akka 2.0 final.
Read more about it in this blog post and the release notes.
Now take her for a spin.
February 2012
3 posts
1 tag
A sample application showcasing play-mini and Akka...
In Akka 2.0 we have decided to replace the Mist based HTTP module with a module called play-mini. With play-mini it’s possible not only to create REST based API in an easy fashion but also to use the power of the Play framework. In this post we will describe the steps needed to build a simple REST service and have it interact with actors in an ActorSystem. It will also show the power of...
2 tags
Why no mailboxSize in Akka 2 ?
Akka 1.x exposed a method to query the mailbox size, which was available both from inside an actor and from outside. We removed this method in 2.0 for a number of reasons, and since this topic came up on the mailing list multiple times already, here is my attempt at making the rationale accessible to a broader audience and disburden the akka-user group.
What are the problems with querying the...
3 tags
Scalability of Fork Join Pool
Akka 2.0 message passing throughput scales way better on multi-core hardware than in previous versions, thanks to the new fork join executor developed by Doug Lea. One micro benchmark illustrates a 1100% increase in throughput!
The new 48 core server had arrived and we were excited to run the benchmarks on the new hardware, but it was sad to see the initial results. It didn’t scale! What...
January 2012
1 post
2 tags
Akka 2.0 Remoting with Java
There have been a lot of requests for a Java example of how to use the remoting capabilities in Akka 2.0 and now there is one. It can be found here:
https://github.com/jboner/akka/tree/master/akka-samples/akka-sample-remote
Some interesting highlights are:
Looking up a remote actor on a remote node:
Creating an actor on a remote node:
As you can see there isn’t much to the code itself...
December 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Benchmark: Akka vs Erlang
Franz Bettag have written up a small post about a benchmark between Akka and Erlang.
Interesting results. On his hardware and specific benchmark Erlang R14B04 did 1 million messages per second while Akka 2.0-SNAPSHOT did 2.1 million per second.
Read more here: http://uberblo.gs/2011/12/scala-akka-and-erlang-actor-benchmarks
…and we still have a lot more performance to squeeze out of Akka.
2 tags
Location Transparency: Remoting in Akka 2.0
The remoting capabilities of Akka 2.0 are really powerful. Something that not has been as powerful is the documentation of the Akka remoting. We are constantly striving on improving it and this blog post will, hopefully, shed some light on the topic. The remoting contains functionality not only to lookup a remote actor and send messages to it but also to deploy actors on remote nodes. These two...
2 tags
Running Akka on ARM7 with 100 requests per second
@honzam399 writes:
“#Akka on ARM7 board, processing 100 simple REST requests/s at 5 V, 500 mA!”
1 tag
1 tag
Akka Team Blog Is Live
Stay tuned for more soon… :-P