#725 Distributed actors?

tompalmer Wed 19 Aug 2009

I'm sure this must have been discussed before, but I failed to find it in a quick scan of quick search results.

What's the strategy for distributing actors? In some cases, I might want clone processes on one or more machines being load-balanced.

In other cases, I might want certain actors only in certain processes or on certain machines.

It seems like setup might be trickier (though hopefully as simple as possible), but it seems like the actor message passing conventions shouldn't need to change. Is this correct? And what's the strategy/plan for this?

brian Wed 19 Aug 2009

Nothing there today.

The model would support it quite well as long as messages were serializable (non-serializable immutable messages wouldn't work). And you would probably build such a beast with actors themselves.

Philosophically I am not sure that distributed actors are the best solution. For example we have implemented a distributed server architecture for SkyFoundry, but we aren't using distributed actors today. Rather we are using more of a REST architecture.

It might be interesting to use actors to "send messages" to a browser via Web Workers.

But haven't give the topic a lot of thought yet.

tompalmer Wed 19 Aug 2009

Thanks for the thoughts on the subject.

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