EDIT: One important thing I forgot mentioning: the actor creation described below depends on the data – sometimes few processing actors are required, and sometimes many.
One component I’m working on needs to create a number of actors (possibly, round-robin routed ones), that each get a rather large amount of messages to process. Each of those actors belongs to a “processing batch” which has a the same initialization parameters.
When I’m running this on the production machine with many messages, I quickly get a number of actor creation timeouts. I’m creating the actors directly with ActorSystem.actorOf().
What’s surprising me though is that all in all there aren’t that many actors being created I’d think (8 “processing sinks” with 5 round-robin routed actors would be 40 actors, which doesn’t seem very much).
I’m shutting down the actors once they’re not needed anymore by having another actor (which counts the amount of successes and failures that it gets via the “processing” actors) send them a PoisonPill so I’d think that they are all shut down correctly.
Am I perhaps doing something wrong here in the way that I am creating those actors, e.g. should I perhaps create them differently? Or would an appropriate strategy be to wait for some of the batches to be done before creating new actors?
Since you did not specify which version you are using I’m assuming that you will be interested in reading this:
http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.0.3/scala/actors.html#Creating_Actors_with_default_constructor (especially the warning)
Besides the technical argument, creating your actors at top level is not a good design, missing out on the fault handling benefits.