Question

I have a setup in which an actor(A) creates an actor(B) which it supervises and restarts when it crashes. From outside the actor system I want to get some value from the ‘nested’ actor B.

I can directly ask the actorSystem for the nested actor using:

val nestedActorB = myActorSystem.actorFor("/user/A/B")

Can I keep a reference to this actor or should I ask the actorSystem for the ref each time I want to ask the nested actor something. (Or should I ask the parent actor for the ref)?

What would be a best practice in this scenario?
(scala 2.9.1 and akka 2.0.4)

Thanks,
Albert

Answer 1

Yes you can keep a reference to the actor and not ask the system every time with actorFor.

There is a difference between local and remote actors and the documentation passage you are referring to is ambiguous and I’ve opened a ticket.

A local actor is only looked up once during the actorFor call so it needs to exist before you look it up, while sends to a remote actor are always by path and the remote actor is looked up on the remote node every time.