Sleeping actors?

Question

What\'s the best way to have an actor sleep? I have actors set up as agents which want to maintain different parts of a database (including getting data from external sources).

Answer 1

There unfortunately are two errors in the answer of oxbow_lakes.

One is a simple declaration mistake (long time vs time: Long), but the second is some more subtle.

oxbow_lakes declares run as

def run = actors.Scheduler.execute(f) 

This however leads to messages disappearing from time to time. That is: they are scheduled but get never send. Declaring run as

def run = f

fixed it for me. It's done the exact way in the ActorPing of lift-util.

The whole scheduler code becomes:

object Scheduler {
    private lazy val sched = Executors.newSingleThreadedScheduledExecutor();
    def schedule(f: => Unit, time: Long) {
        sched.schedule(new Runnable {
          def run = f
        }, time - Platform.currentTime, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
    }
}

I tried to edit oxbow_lakes post, but could not save it (broken?), not do I have rights to comment, yet. Therefore a new post.