CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascalaakkaakka-http
amit kaushik
amit kaushik

Reputation: 79

How to restrict the akka actor to do one job at a time

I have an Java-Akka based application where one Akka actor tells another Akka actor to do a certain jobs and it starts doing the job in the command prompt but If I gave him 10 jobs it starts all the jobs at a time in 10 command prompt. If i'll be having 100+ jobs than my system will be hanged.

So how can I make my application to do the job 1 at a time and all the other jobs should will get the CPU in FIFO(first in first out) manner.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 204

Answers (1)

d-n-ust
d-n-ust

Reputation: 122

The question is not quite clear but I try to answer with my understanding.

So, it looks like you use actor as a job dispatcher which translates job messages to calls for some "job executor system". Each incoming message is translated to some call.

If this call is synchronous (which smells when working with actors of course but just for understanding) then no problem in your case, your actor waits until call is complete, then proceed with next message in its mailbox.

If that call is asynchronous which I guess what you have then all the messages will be handled one by one without waiting for each other.

So you need to throttle the messages handling in order to have at most one message being processed at a time. This can be archived by "pull" pattern which is described here. You basically allocate one master actor which has a queue with incoming messages (jobs) and one worker actor which asks for job when it is free of jobs. Be careful with the queue in master actor - you probably don't want it to grow too much, think about monitoring and applying back-pressure, which is another big topic covered by akka-stream.

Upvotes: 2

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