Actor design for queue with a long running task

Question

I have a bunch of actors running which need to enqueue tasks to be processed sequentially, one at a time. I will need an actor to process the tasks on the queue. Is it ok to create one actor and pass a reference to that actor as a parameter to each job (an implicit queue)? Ex.

Actor:

class QActor extends Actor{
  def receive = {
    case input => sender ! doSomething(input)
  }
}

Sender

val future = myQActor ? msg
Await.result(future)

Answer 1

使用另一个actor及其邮箱作为队列很好，只是不要阻止发件人。

Answer 2

Your approach looks fine but with one caveat. The ask pattern ( ? ) requires an implicit timeout, after which if no reply is received, the Future fails with a timeout error. If you have multiple actors all simultaneously asking your QActor which processes each request sequentially, it may be difficult to know what is a reasonable timeout to set. It may be better to use myQActor ! msg myQActor ! msg and implement a handler in Receive of your sender to handler the expected response.