使用Akka并行进行实时计算

Question

I have a use case as follows:

I need to split my computation among multiple threads and all threads needs to send back the results to master thread in quick time.

Flow

1. There is a search query which is entered by user
2. Query comes to akka
3. Query needs to be distributed among number of akka actors .
4. Each akka actor will do some kind of processing and return a results to parent actor

But each akka actor is single threaded. And I have multiple queries coming at the same time.

How can I serve multiple queries in quick time without making any query to wait on its computation.

Is akka suitable for this use case? If yes how can I model it?

Answer 1

Akka is perfectly suited to this kind of application!

t is true that each actor is single threaded. That is, each actor processes its own messages sequentially (one at a time) and synchronously (single threaded). But you're free to create as many actors as you'd like, and those actors operate completely asynchronously from each other.

In other words, you can spawn a new actor for each query request. Each actor handles a single request in a safe, single threaded fashion, but as a whole you're handling multiple queries simultaneously.

For the use case you've described, I'd look into using akka-io for your IO layer and something like the balancing dispatcher pattern to divide the queries among workers.