Question

Tha Akka documentaton indicates:

A durable mailbox is a replacement for the standard actor mailbox that
is durable.

What is the mechanism used as a standard mailbox so an Actor can read its messages after a restart?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I’ve implemented a small project to check this out with my own hands.

The configuration of an Actor’s mailbox is achieved via the dispatcher. The following are the possibilities for the mailbox:

UnboundedMailbox
BoundedMailbox
UnboundedPriorityMailbox
BoundedPriorityMailbox

and finally:

Durable mailboxes

I had to configure my actor system with a dispatcher which indicates that the mailbox is file based. The following lines were just neccesary in the configuration of the Actor System:

my-dispatcher {
  mailbox-type = akka.actor.mailbox.FileBasedMailboxType
}

In adition, I configured the properties for the file based durable mailbox, with the indications provided in:

http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.0.3/modules/durable-mailbox.html

Finally, the creator of the specific Actor I wanted to persist in a file creates the Actor with the following:

context.actorOf(Props[MyActor].withDispatcher("my-dispatcher"), "myactor1"

I still need more practice to make an Actor to be recreated and read the remaining messaged in the mailbox, but the main question is answered now.

Everything was found in the documentation, it was just a matter of getting things done.