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Is there documentation of the lifecycle of a ReceivePersistentActor? I'm interested in the circumstances a persistent actor is killed/stopped/dehydrated to allocate resources for other actors. Our application creates a lot of persistent actors and I'm seeing that some are Terminated. Is there a timeframe that a persistent actor has to be "inactive" before it is terminated? What other conditions are considered?

Brian Sain
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1 Answers1

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Actors are only terminated automatically when:

  1. Their parent is shut down or
  2. If you're running Akka.Cluster.Sharding, actors that are created via the sharding system will be automatically passivated after two minutes of inactivity: https://getakka.net/articles/clustering/cluster-sharding.html#passivation

Normal persistent actors don't shut down on their own - they'll hang around so long as the ActorSystem and their parent actor are live.

Aaronontheweb
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  • Are they ever terminated to free up resources? The parent is receiving the "Terminated" message, and I figured it's because of resource allocation since we are spinning up thousands of child actors at once. – Brian Sain Aug 13 '21 at 19:51
  • No, Akka.NET won't automatically terminate actors outside of those two use cases I mentioned. Programming an actor to terminate after a long idle period using `ReceiveTimeout` is something that many users do frequently though for that very purpose. – Aaronontheweb Aug 13 '21 at 20:28
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    It's worth noting that JVM Akka has added (as of 2.6.18, presumably driven by Akka Serverless) support for pluggable automatic passivation strategies (the other one now shipping with Akka being a fixed limit and then evict the least recently used). Presumably similar support could eventually be used in Akka.NET. – Levi Ramsey Jan 05 '22 at 11:36