Actors are not always the best solution

[bearophile]

This is a quotation from the "Twitter on Scala" by Bill Venners, April 3, 2009:
http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/twitter_on_scala.html

>So it is a specialized system. We’ve built it in Scala wrapping Jetty, and 
>initially we had a number of actors inside the system: one to pull messages 
>off of our internal messaging queue, and a number of other actors that 
>represented clients. And over time as we ran more and more system tests on it, 
>we found that actors weren’t necessarily the ideal concurrency model for all 
>parts of that system. Some parts of the concurrency model of that system are 
>still actor based. For example, it uses a memcache library that Robey wrote, 
>which is actor based. But for other parts we’ve just gone back to a 
>traditional Java threading model. The engineer working on that, John Kalucki, 
>just found it was a little bit easier to test, a bit more predictable. The 
>nice thing was, it took minutes to switch code that was actor based over to 
>something thread based. It was a couple of search and replaces. So it’s not so 
>bad if actors fail you for whatever reason.<

Bye,
bearophile