I'm a complete newbie to the world of reactive programming. I'm looking into Akka Actors as a beginning step to play with.
My understanding of the Thread Based concurrency model is (eg of a Vanilla Servlet based model): 1. For every request from the client, a new thread is spawned. 2. This means the execution of all the underlying code is attached to this thread and occur serially. Apparently even if one section of the code has a bottleneck (remote Webservice calls etc), the Thread will will be blocked and wait and remain idle. 3. The servers (containers) has a fixed threadpool to accommodate max number of concurrent threads and apparently, they will quickly run of of threads because of bottleneck. My understanding of the Reactive concurrency model is (eg of a Akka based model): 1. All the logic is no longer attached to a single thread and executed serially. 2. The execution flow is reactive (ie on message, an actor gets triggered). Now my question: Assume the bottleneck of the remote webservice call exists in both the models. How is the actor model helps in better CPU / Core utilization? Won't we have the same problem of the execution threads within the actor getting blocked? For ex: If there are 200 actors concurrently blocked by this webservice call? Doesn't it mean there are 200 threads currently blocked? I understand that there will still be other actors reacting to other upstream events. Is this what we refer to as better utilization of the CPU? In a Threaded model, is only the small size of the Threadpool the cause of the problem? Doesn't the Actor Subsystem have a threadpool to spawn off a new actor and react to a specific event? If yes, then don't we have the same problem? Pardon me if this question is completely stupid. -- >>>>>>>>>> Read the docs: http://akka.io/docs/ >>>>>>>>>> Check the FAQ: >>>>>>>>>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/additional/faq.html >>>>>>>>>> Search the archives: https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Akka User List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akka-user+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to akka-user@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/akka-user. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
