Akka: Cleanup of dynamically created actors necessary when they have finished?

Question

I have implemented an Actor system using Akka and its Java API UntypedActor. In it, one actor (type A) starts other actors (type B) dynamically on demand, using getContext

Answer 1

In addition to Roland Kuhn's answer, rather than create a new actor for every request, you could create a predefined set of actors that share the same dispatcher, or you can use a router that distributes requests to a pool of actors.

The Balancing Pool Router, for example, allows you to have a fixed set of actors of a particular type share the same mailbox:

akka.actor.deployment {
  /parent/router9 {
    router = balancing-pool
    nr-of-instances = 5
  }
}

Read the documentation on dispatchers and on routing for further detail.