akka Dispatchers Setting the dispatcher for an Actor

Example

So in case you want to give your Actor a different dispatcher than the default, you need to do two things, of which the first is to configure the dispatcher in your application.conf:

my-dispatcher {
  # Dispatcher is the name of the event-based dispatcher
  type = Dispatcher
  # What kind of ExecutionService to use
  executor = "fork-join-executor"
  # Configuration for the fork join pool
  fork-join-executor {
    # Min number of threads to cap factor-based parallelism number to
    parallelism-min = 2
    # Parallelism (threads) ... ceil(available processors * factor)
    parallelism-factor = 2.0
    # Max number of threads to cap factor-based parallelism number to
    parallelism-max = 10
  }
  # Throughput defines the maximum number of messages to be
  # processed per actor before the thread jumps to the next actor.
  # Set to 1 for as fair as possible.
  throughput = 100
}

And here's another example that uses the "thread-pool-executor":

my-thread-pool-dispatcher {
  # Dispatcher is the name of the event-based dispatcher
  type = Dispatcher
  # What kind of ExecutionService to use
  executor = "thread-pool-executor"
  # Configuration for the thread pool
  thread-pool-executor {
    # minimum number of threads to cap factor-based core number to
    core-pool-size-min = 2
    # No of core threads ... ceil(available processors * factor)
    core-pool-size-factor = 2.0
    # maximum number of threads to cap factor-based number to
    core-pool-size-max = 10
  }
  # Throughput defines the maximum number of messages to be
  # processed per actor before the thread jumps to the next actor.
  # Set to 1 for as fair as possible.
  throughput = 100
}

You can then define the dispatcher to use for your actor inside you config, e.g.

akka.actor.deployment {
  /myactor {
    dispatcher = my-dispatcher
  }
}

and create this actor with the name specified in the config:

import akka.actor.Props
val myActor = context.actorOf(Props[MyActor], "myactor")

Or you can lookup your dispatcher with:

import akka.actor.Props
val myActor =
  context.actorOf(Props[MyActor].withDispatcher("my-dispatcher"), "myactor1")