Akka and Netty

[Christer Sandberg]

Hi!

Our system which is exclusively built upon Akka and actors integrate a lot with other systems via sockets and Netty.

Each of the Netty clients have a factory which is used to create a new channel/connection that embeds

org.jboss.netty.channel.socket.nio.NioClientSocketChannelFactory which is created with Executors.newCachedThreadPool for

both the boss and worker threads.

Would we benefit by using a one of the executor services provided by Akka instead since we live in an actor system?

It feels a bit ugly that all the Netty client factories creates their own thread pools/executor services, but maybe this is the way to go?

Any thoughts from the experts?

/Christer

[√iktor Ҡlang]

What version are we talking about?

Cheers,

√

 

/Christer

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Viktor Klang

Akka Tech Lead

Typesafe - The software stack for applications that scale

Twitter: @viktorklang

[Christer Sandberg]

Ah, sorry...

Akka 2.0-M4 and Netty 3.2.7-Final

/Christer

2012/2/13 √iktor Ҡlang <viktor...@gmail.com>

[√iktor Ҡlang]

Akka 2.0-M4 uses Netty 3.3.0-Final btw

What is reused for both inbound and outbound channels:

  val executor = new OrderedMemoryAwareThreadPoolExecutor(

    settings.ExecutionPoolSize,

    settings.MaxChannelMemorySize,

    settings.MaxTotalMemorySize,

    settings.ExecutionPoolKeepalive.length,

    settings.ExecutionPoolKeepalive.unit,

    system.threadFactory)

The Netty remoting in 2.0-M4 shares the following amongst it's Active outbound connections:

  val clientChannelFactory = new NioClientSocketChannelFactory(

    Executors.newCachedThreadPool(system.threadFactory),

    Executors.newCachedThreadPool(system.threadFactory))

  private val executionHandler = new ExecutionHandler(netty.executor)

And the server:

private val factory = new NioServerSocketChannelFactory(

    Executors.newCachedThreadPool(netty.system.threadFactory),

    Executors.newCachedThreadPool(netty.system.threadFactory))

  private val executionHandler = new ExecutionHandler(netty.executor)

They are all also sharing the same HashedWheelTimer.

So essentially the remoting uses its own threads, which mean that remoting is decoupled, processing-wise, from the actors, which means that serialization etc is handled by other threads.

There's a lot of potential tuning you can make. Are you seeing any problems?

Cheers,

√

[Christer Sandberg]

Thanks a lot Viktor!

No, we're not having any problems att all but we have 3 different NioClientSocketChannelFactory instances (since we have 3 different clients) and it they are all created with Executors.newCachedThreadPool. I was just thinking that it might be better to share the thread pools that Akka provides. Note that I'm not talking of Netty in Akka as in remoting. These are home grown Netty client implementations for custom integration.

[√iktor Ҡlang]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Christer Sandberg <chr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks a lot Viktor!
>
> No, we're not having any problems att all but we have 3 different
> NioClientSocketChannelFactory instances (since we have 3 different clients)
> and it they are all created with Executors.newCachedThreadPool. I was just
> thinking that it might be better to share the thread pools that Akka
> provides. Note that I'm not talking of Netty in Akka as in remoting. These
> are home grown Netty client implementations for custom integration.

I don't see any really simple way to reuse that. And Akka does some
elaborate things to shutdown threadpools and replace them with lazy
new ones if they aren't used for a while etc.

Cheers,
√

[Christer Sandberg]

Okay, thanks very much for the info. I'll just stick to what I got then. Good to know since Akka does everything so magically good so I just had to ask ;)

[√iktor Ҡlang]

Lol, if it works then it works :-)