Blocking calls in Akka Actors

Question

As a newbie, I am trying to understand how actors work. And, from the documentation, I think I understand that actors are objects which gets executed in sync mode and also t

Answer 1

It really depends on the use-case. If the queries do not need to be serialized, then you can execute the query in a future and send the results back to the sender as follows:

import scala.concurrent.{ future, blocking}
import akka.pattern.pipe

val resFut = future {
  blocking {
    executeQuery()
  }
}

resFut pipeTo sender

You could also create a dedicated dispatcher exclusively for the DB calls and use a router for actor creation. This way you can also easily limit the number of concurrent DB requests.