So you’ve just learned Akka and are tremendously excited. It’s got dispatchers, routers, supervisors – so many shiny things to play with, and in style (I mean, come on, a dispatcher sounds a lot nicer than, say, an AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean). And so it happens that, perhaps even unknowingly to you (you’re busy configuring a pool router), your actors start getting names … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: trusting the network
One anti-pattern I’ve observed in networked Akka applications is a tendency to forget that it is, well, networked and to treat the network as a friendly place. How does that look like? Well, consider the following piece of code:
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actorOnDifferentNode.tell(veryImportantMessage, sender()); |
Akka’s default message sending mechanism is the fire-and-forget tell method. And that works great – until it doesn’t. See, tell … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: using remoting
Whilst I have always successfully discouraged my clients from using Akka Remoting in their application, I often get questions regarding remoting while talking about anti-patterns at conferences and user groups. Don’t get me wrong. I love Akka remoting. Especially the new Aeron-based Artery remoting version that is based on UDP rather than TCP. Whilst it maintains the same delivery guarantees, … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: blocking
This is probably one of the most frequent (and dangerous) anti-patterns when it comes to working with Akka. Let’s look at an adequate description of the mindset you must be in in order to use it: So maybe you didn’t actually want to see the world burn. Maybe you thought that this one time it was okay to call blocking … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: being out of touch with the hardware
Choosing Akka as a tool is often – if not always – driven by the need for good performance. Surely, the actor model itself is appealing as a means for organizing and reasoning about code, but this isn’t in itself a good reason enough to use the Akka toolkit. If all you are concerned about is a nice way to … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: logging (the wrong way)
Update: removed rogue toString call in the second code example, since it was unnecessary (and harmful). Debugging actor systems is no small feat, even when there is IDE support for it. In fact, debugging any asynchronous system for that matter is a rather complicated task. Which is why, especially during development, it is not entirely uncommon to rely on DEBUG … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: too many actor systems
Admittedly I’ve seen this one in use only one time, but it was one time too many. For some reason I keep seeing clients come up with this during design discussions and reviews though, therefore it makes it into the list of Akka anti-patterns. What I am talking about is this: Reasons I hear for this design: isolation of concerns: … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: race conditions
The actor model makes it possible to build highly-concurrent applications through the notion that actors obey the actor send rule and the actor subsequent processing rule, hence creating a single-threaded environment inside of an actor. That being said, it’s all an illusion: as we have briefly talked about previously, Akka’s dispatchers make sure that messages are being processed by actors … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: flat actor hierarchies or mixing business logic and failure handling
One of the fundamental ideas built into Akka is the one of failure handling through parental supervision. In other words this means agencing actors in such a way that parent actors that depend upon the correct execution of a child to perform their work are also responsible for deciding what to do when one of the child actor crashes. An … Read More
Akka anti-patterns: shared mutable state
When I work with clients on designing actor systems there are a few anti-patterns that seem to make it into initial, non-reviewed designs no matter what. In this series of short articles I would like to cover a few of those. Anti-pattern #1: sharing mutable state accross actors Even though the Akka documentation points this out in various places, one … Read More