[valenterry]

I don't understand what you mean.

In my scenario, multiple machines are used and necessary for the same service (otherwise there is no point in using Akka Cluster).

Example: online games. You have room/game being created on the fly and it is destroyed an hour later. There are many of these rooms and they are distributed over multiple machines. You can't really use rabbitMQ here, it's not performant enough.

And even if you did, you would pretty much reimplement what Akka Cluster does for you: instance synchronization, different strategies for handling split brain scenarios, dead letter handling, direct message forwarding, persistence (if needed) and so on

[vinay_ys]

If you want to host a game state object in memory (vs serialized and saved to SSD) because you have lots of frequent write/reads happening to that object in a very short window of time such that the IO cost and CPU cost (ser/deserialisation) is higher and the incremental latency is a blocker, then this design of hosting a full-blown object in memory within your runtime makes sense (number of reads per game object per second must be high and must be sustained for a good number of seconds for this tradeoff math to be in this design's favor, given today's SSD costs vs memory costs).

But I wonder if you will suffer from random GC pauses, inability to carefully isolate different behaviors into different resource clusters, resulting in uncontrolled blast radius etc.

If you are anyway doing persistence (because you care to not lose game progress), and whenever a cluster node dies you need to resurrect game state from persistence, I wonder if you will get the game state restored within a bounded latency.

If this happens frequently enough (to affect say 5% of your users – enough to kill your game experience), is the benefits of latency gain from in-memory object reads wiped out?

[valenterry]

I mean, you are right that Akka Cluster is JVM based and hence can bring the problems you mentioned. But then again, most high frequency trading also runs on the JVM, so it can often be worked around.

> If this happens frequently enough (to affect say 5% of your users – enough to kill your game experience), is the benefits of latency gain from in-memory object reads wiped out?

For this specific use-case, I don't think there is really an alternative, except for specifically a hand-crafted system (or non-scale, such as everyone hosts and manages their own server).

[vinay_ys]

> But then again, most high frequency trading also runs on the JVM, so it can often be worked around.

JVM is an awesome piece of technology. And you can do robotic control systems to high-frequency trading systems with it with careful programming.

But I've seen a lot of Java code running in production suffering from latency jitters and needing continuous profiling and optimization by a small group of performance engineers while the majority of application engineers keep adding to GC load.

> For this specific use-case, I don't think there is really an alternative, except for specifically a hand-crafted system

Yes, but I think the handcrafted system doesn't need to be very complex. It can be quite simple and easy to understand and tame to your needs as your scale and complexity grows.

[randomopining]

Doesn't it have the new GC's that are supposed to be minimal pause and gamechangers?

[valenterry]

Yes, but for GC still must happen and sometimes even milliseconds can be a problem, depending on the use-case. It really depends on what your business does, so the OPs concerns with the JVM are very valid.

At the same time, I think (while not being an expert) that in the majority of the cases, the GC will not be a problem and that the time you can save from using Akka Cluster allows you to optimize your system more than enough to make up for any GC latency problems, in almost every system.

The only technology that might be better/comparable here is the erlang VM, but I have never used it myself.

[t-writescode]

You're not just talking online games, you're talking enormous-world MMOs, and that's such a far cry from the areas that I have worked with and thought about how to work with in any detail that I can't usefully add anything.

If you're trying to manage the concurrent state of 10s of thousands of players in a game, all server-side, and you want specific actors to handle that single player and you don't want a globally persistent state, then I suppose this makes sense.

I've never worked with anything of that scale though.

[valenterry]

> You're not just talking online games, you're talking enormous-world MMOs

I am talking about bigger scala here of course. But not necessarily what you describe.

Take games like League of Legends or Counterstrike as examples. Having one game per actor seems like a sensible design to me.

But yeah, I think that traditional techniques still get you very far. I heard that Slack was running just on (multiple) postgres for the longest time.

[alexis2b]

Interesting! Not trying to divert from Akka which is a wonderful piece of engineering, but your comment reminded me of Microsoft’s take at the Actor model with Project Orléans - which was used for the backend side of the Halo / XBox MMO [0].

I think the GA version of Project Orléans is now called Service Fabric, although I never had the pleasure to try it.

[0] https://youtu.be/I91ZU8tEJkU

[reubenbond]

Orleans and Service Fabric are different. Orleans has been running in production for some time now and is actively developed on GitHub: https://github.com/dotnet/orleans. Teams inside Microsoft run it on top of Service Fabric (and Kubernetes, etc.) More details in this talk: https://youtu.be/KhgYlvGLv9c

Service Fabric has something called Reliable Actors which are heavily inspired by Orleans.

Source: I'm the project lead for Orleans