CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaactorakka
Jay Hutfles
Jay Hutfles

Reputation: 65

Akka actor that still works while waiting for new messages?

I'm new to Akka, and I apologize in advance if this is a basic question. I'm not sure how to use actors to implement the following scenario, or if it's even possible (or desirable).

Before considering Akka, I'd kind of rolled my own simple actor model, with each actor running in its own thread. The run() methods would monitor an event queue, so I could have the consumer continually do something similar to this:

while not done
    poll the event queue
    if something was polled
        process the event
    if all state is available
        do one step of the long running task

The continual polling of the event queue didn't sit well with me, but it at least made progress on the long running task between events.

Is there a best way to use Akka actors to implement this? I could implement a "heartbeat" which sends a message to the consumer (or sent internally to the consumer by itself) to do another step of the long running task, but I don't like the thought of having it be scheduled since the steps in the long running task aren't uniform in duration. I don't want to queue up iterations which keep it too busy so not to quickly respond to messages from the producer. But I also don't want to schedule it too infrequently, so it's sitting idle when it could be making progress...

Or would it be more appropriate to use a Dataflow model of concurrency for this (something I've only ready about)? The consumer can't start until the state is all bound, so it seems natural to define the process in terms of Dataflow variables. But if Dataflow variables can only be bound once, it doesn't seem appropriate for getting repeated updates in state from the consumers.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1174

Answers (1)

Viktor Klang
Viktor Klang

Reputation: 26579

You can have the produces publish the changes to an Akka EventBus, and have the consumer register to listen for these events, then when it has all it needs, it can process the full chunk, or spawn a new actor that processes the full chunks.

Upvotes: 2

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