服务结构演员计时器性能影响

Question

We are thinking of potentially using Service Fabric Actor Timers for a sort of TTL management service. It has the potential to have 100 hundreds of thousands of actor timers at time. We are concerned with the overhead of having this many actor timers running at a time but there does not seem to be any sort of documentation regarding actor timers their performance implications or underlying mechanisms. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

From what I know, Actor's Timer uses a lightweight 'System.Threading.Timer' under the hood, creating along a delegate that has a code to dispatch a call toward your 'wake-up' callback when the time comes. And seems like the dispatch happens just like any other incoming request would have, so I'd say that couple extra classes with a delegate are the cost of having SF Actor Timer.

Of course, if your need to perform a lot of work within the timer's callback then it will lock up your actor, so it also depends on how many requests will get blocked and how fast you could leave the callback.