Here is what we've figured out. We've got a native library that contains a thread local member that includes a ZMQ socket. That socket is apparently not being correctly cleaned-up on thread death. ZMQ sockets are created from a ZMQ context, which creates 2 helper threads upon construction. Those are the threads we were leaking.
The actor in Akka was invoking this native library. In our old code, using Scala's now-deprecated, built-in actor library, we had locked that actor to a single thread, so there was never any thread leakage. In Akka, we were using a Pinned dispatcher, with the understanding that that would result in the same behavior. The scalaDocs say "Dedicates a unique thread for each actor passed in as reference." The akka manual also adds "Note that it's not guaranteed that the *same* thread is used over time, since the core pool timeout is used for PinnedDispatcher to keep resource usage down in case of idle actors. To use the same thread all the time you need to add thread-pool-executor.allow-core-timeout=off to the configuration of the PinnedDispatcher." We missed that part. It might help others to have that added to the scaladocs. The solution that we've found to work is to set the allow-core-timeout to off and the thread-pool-executor.keep-alive-time to a really high number. With those settings we've now got the behavior we thought we were originally getting, where the actor is locked into a single thread for its entire lifetime. We're also looking at fixing the thread leak issue in the native library. Thanks for the responses. cheers jesse c -- >>>>>>>>>> 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 https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
