Best practices with Akka in Scala and third-party Java libraries

Question

I need to use memcached Java API in my Scala/Akka code. This API gives you both synchronous and asynchronous methods. The asynchronous ones return java.util.concurrent.Futur

Answer 1

I always go with the first option. But i am doing it in a slightly different way. I don't use the blocking feature. (Actually i have not thought about it yet.) Instead i am providing a custom execution context to the Future that wraps the synchronous blocking call. So it looks basically like this:

val ecForBlockingMemcachedStuff = ExecutionContext.fromExecutorService(Executors.newFixedThreadPool(100)) // whatever number you think is appropriate
// i create a separate ec for each blocking client/resource/api i use

Future {
    cache.get(key) //synchronous blocking call
}(ecForBlockingMemcachedStuff) // or mark the execution context implicit. I like to mention it explicitly.

So all the blocking calls will use a dedicated execution context (= Threadpool). So it is separated from your main execution context responsible for non blocking stuff.

This approach is also explained in a online training video for Play/Akka provided by Typesafe. There is a video in lesson 4 about how to handle blocking calls. It is explained by Nilanjan Raychaudhuri (hope i spelled it correctly), who is a well known author for Scala books.

Update: I had a discussion with Nilanjan on twitter. He explained what the difference between the approach with blocking and a custom ExecutionContext is. The blocking feature just creates a special ExecutionContext. It provides a naive approach to the question how many threads you will need. It spawns a new thread every time, when all the other existing threads in the pool are busy. So it is actually an uncontrolled ExecutionContext. It could create lots of threads and lead to problems like an out of memory error. So the solution with the custom execution context is actually better, because it makes this problem obvious. Nilanjan also added that you need to consider circuit breaking for the case this pool gets overloaded with requests.

TLDR: Yeah, blocking calls suck. Use a custom/dedicated ExecutionContext for blocking calls. Also consider circuit breaking.

Answer 2

The Akka documentation provides a few suggestions on how to deal with blocking calls:

In some cases it is unavoidable to do blocking operations, i.e. to put a thread to sleep for an indeterminate time, waiting for an external event to occur. Examples are legacy RDBMS drivers or messaging APIs, and the underlying reason is typically that (network) I/O occurs under the covers. When facing this, you may be tempted to just wrap the blocking call inside a Future and work with that instead, but this strategy is too simple: you are quite likely to find bottlenecks or run out of memory or threads when the application runs under increased load.

The non-exhaustive list of adequate solutions to the “blocking problem” includes the following suggestions:

• Do the blocking call within an actor (or a set of actors managed by a router), making sure to configure a thread pool which is either dedicated for this purpose or sufficiently sized.

• Do the blocking call within a Future, ensuring an upper bound on the number of such calls at any point in time (submitting an unbounded number of tasks of this nature will exhaust your memory or thread limits).

• Do the blocking call within a Future, providing a thread pool with an upper limit on the number of threads which is appropriate for the hardware on which the application runs.

• Dedicate a single thread to manage a set of blocking resources (e.g. a NIO selector driving multiple channels) and dispatch events as they occur as actor messages.

The first possibility is especially well-suited for resources which are single-threaded in nature, like database handles which traditionally can only execute one outstanding query at a time and use internal synchronization to ensure this. A common pattern is to create a router for N actors, each of which wraps a single DB connection and handles queries as sent to the router. The number N must then be tuned for maximum throughput, which will vary depending on which DBMS is deployed on what hardware.