Is it right to ceate actor instance for each new process managed by FMS

Question

I'm trying to design application which will manage multi state processes. Something like money transfer processes from one account to another. I have decided to use Akka.Net FMS. But then I have stucked when I found out that each new process (new Transfer) needs new actor instance because FMS state is stored in "running" actor. For me it means that if I have 1000 simultaneous requests for transfer then I should create 1000 instances. Keeping in mind that according the documentation each actor is working in its own thread how realistic is this approach?. Or did I understand anything wrongly?

Answer 1

Actors don't work "in their own threads", they work on one thread at a time which is different thing - you can have millions of actors working perfectly on 2 OS threads, but at any given time the same actor will always be executed only one one of them (unless you'll escape that barrier explicitly eg. by running task inside of an actor). Single actor by itself occupies less than 1kB or memory and doesn't have any inherent requirements on operating system resources (like threads).

In general having one actor working as a transfer coordinator is ok and it's quite common pattern in Akka.NET.