Akka ExecutionContext Test

Disclaimer

This is just for my study. Threading, pools and configuration of them is some what of an art as I understand it and I am far from being an expert. That said, there are some great minds in this fields, please refer to the sources section below.

Source

Video

First some definitions

I know, this is a copy/paste of a lot of resources on the Internet, but I found that having all the necessary information for this subject in one place reads really well. Better than switching browser tabs in any case! Please read the subject you do not know, they are all relevant for the discussion later.

Thread

A thread is a thread of execution in a program. The Java Virtual Machine allows an application to have multiple threads of execution running concurrently.

Every thread has a priority. Threads with higher priority are executed in preference to threads with lower priority. Each thread may or may not also be marked as a daemon. When code running in some thread creates a new Thread object, the new thread has its priority initially set equal to the priority of the creating thread, and is a daemon thread if and only if the creating thread is a daemon.

When a Java Virtual Machine starts up, there is usually a single non-daemon thread (which typically calls the method named main of some designated class). The Java Virtual Machine continues to execute threads until either of the following occurs:

The exit method of class Runtime has been called and the security manager has permitted the exit operation to take place.
All threads that are not daemon threads have died, either by returning from the call to the run method or by throwing an exception that propagates beyond the run method.

There are two ways to create a new thread of execution. One is to declare a class to be a subclass of Thread. This subclass should override the run method of class Thread. An instance of the subclass can then be allocated and started:

class Foo extends Thread {
  override def run(): Unit = {
    Thread.sleep(1000)
    println("Done")
  }
}

REPL:

> val p = new Foo
> p.start

The other way to create a thread is to declare a class that implements the Runnable interface. That class then implements the run method. An instance of the class can then be allocated, passed as an argument when creating Thread, and started. The same example in this other style looks like the following:

class Foo extends Runnable {
  override def run(): Unit = {
    Thread.sleep(1000)
    println("Done")
  }
}

> new Thread(new Foo).start()

How Cheap Are Threads?

According to this source, threads are very expensive, based upon your OS, JVM implementation, every platform has its own limits and cost, but as a rule of thumb, for all platforms, having a lot of threads (thousands) is bad. Let's find out why:

Thread lifecycle overhead

Thread creation and teardown are not free. The actual overhead varies across platforms, but thread creation takes time, introducing latency into request processing, and requires some processing activity by the JVM and OS. If requests are frequent and lightweight, as in most server applications, creating a new thread for each request can consume significant computing resources

Context switch

When OS decides to switch to another thread execution, there is a context switch (all the registers and data are being pushed to memory, CPU and RAM are being tuned to another thread, another thread restores its state agein etc). These operations aren’t too slow, but when there are hundreds or even thousands of threads, it can be a real disaster. OS will work inefficiently and most of time will be used to switch one context to another.

Thread data

Each thread had its (own) stack (quite huge block, usually 256KB by default), its descriptors. Threads also may have ThreadLocal variables. With default settings only 4 threads consume 1 Mb of memory. It’s quite huge amount of memory! Having 300 worker threads in a pool (we will look at this later) costs about 75MB of memory.

System overhead

Thread creation in Java forces the OS to create a memory block for stack and other data. It is done using system calls. That means that for each thread at least one system native thread is being executed to prepare memory for it. It also has some overhead.

Use Thread Pools

Threads are a valuable resource, and knowing what we know now, it would be a shame to throw it away. Try thinking about threads as your new shiny favorite dream car, you won't throw it away after just one ride would you? You would reuse it and using thread pools, we can do just that.

Runnable (Interface)

The Runnable interface should be implemented by any class whose instances are intended to be executed by a thread. The class must define a method of no arguments called run.

This interface is designed to provide a common protocol for objects that wish to execute code while they are active. For example, Runnable is implemented by class Thread. Being active simply means that a thread has been started and has not yet been stopped.

In addition, Runnable provides the means for a class to be active while not subclassing Thread. A class that implements Runnable can run without subclassing Thread by instantiating a Thread instance and passing itself in as the target. In most cases, the Runnable interface should be used if you are only planning to override the run() method and no other Thread methods. This is important because classes should not be subclassed unless the programmer intends on modifying or enhancing the fundamental behavior of the class.

Executor (Interface)

An Executor is an object that executes submitted Runnable tasks. This interface provides a way of decoupling task submission from the mechanics of how each task will be run, including details of thread use, scheduling, etc. An Executor is normally used instead of explicitly creating threads.

For example, rather than invoking:

new Thread(new(RunnableTask())).start()

for each of a set of tasks, like we all have done, you might use:

Executor executor = anExecutor;
executor.execute(new RunnableTask1());
executor.execute(new RunnableTask2());

Tasks are most often executed in some thread, other than the caller's thread. Tasks are also usually executed asynchronously, but the Exectutor can also execute tasks immediately in the caller's thread, thus being synchronous.

ExecutorService (Interface)

An ExecutorService is-an Executor that provides methods to manage termination, and methods that can produce a Future for tracking progress of one or more asynchronous tasks.

An ExecutorService can be shut down, which will cause it to reject new tasks. Two different methods are provided for shutting down an ExecutorService. The shutdown() method will allow previously submitted tasks to execute before terminating, while the shutdownNow() method prevents waiting tasks from starting and attempts to stop currently executing tasks.

Upon termination, an executor has no tasks actively executing, no tasks awaiting execution, and no new tasks can be submitted.

An unused ExecutorService should be shut down to allow reclamation of its resources.

Method submit extends base method Executor.execute(Runnable) by creating and returning a Future that can be used to cancel execution and/or wait for completion. Methods invokeAny and invokeAll perform the most commonly useful forms of bulk execution, executing a collection of tasks and then waiting for at least one, or all, to complete.

ExecutorService Implementations

For our study, there are two ExecutorService Implementations

The ForkJoinPool
The ThreadPoolExecutor

The ForkJoinPool (ExecutorService Implementation)

The Java fork/join framework provides support for fine-grained, recursive, divide and conquer parallelism. It is part of Java sinds version 7 in late 2011.

The ''fork'' operation creates a new unit of work that may execute in parallel with its parent creator. The ''join'' operation merges control once the parent (forker) and child (forked) tasks have both completed. The significance of using fork/join parallelism is that is provides very efficient load balancing, if the subtasks are decomposed in such a way that they can be executed without dependencies.

Fork/join parallelism is implemented by means of a fixed pool of worker threads. Each work thread can execute one thread at a time. Tasks waiting to be executed are stored in a queue, which is owned by a particular worker thread. Currently executing tasks can dynamically generate (fork) new tasks, which are then enqueued for subsequent execution. This is ideal for dynamic task creation when we cannot determine beforehand how many task there wil be.

When a worker thread has completed execution of a particular task, it fetches the next task from its own queue. If the queue is empty it can ''steal'' a task from another queue. This work stealing enables efficient load balancing.

The Java fork/join framework targets single JVM shared-memory parallelism ie a multicore machine running a multi-threaded Java application in a single JVM instance. The number of worker threads in a fork/join pool is generally upper-bounded by the number of cores in the system.

The dynamic load balancing is useful since some forked tasks may complete execution much quicker than others. For instance, the computation time may depend on values in the input data set, rather than just the size of the input data. There may be reasons for some tasks to finish quicker than others, cache locality, turbo boosting, make some cores faster than others. This makes makes dynamic load balancing ideal for multicore architectures.

What makes it special?

Worker threads: Small number of threads (as possible) based upon number of cpu cores, normally one thread per core
Work stealing: ''find an execute tasks'' that are submitted to the pool
Best fit for event-style tasks that are never joined, for example with Akka Actors.
Bad fit for: Blocking I/O operations (JDBC), number crunching code that by virtue of calculation uses the thread, because there are only a small number of threads, this can lead to thread starvation, which means there are no more threads available and no more tasks can be executed, halting the system.

Parallelism

The parallelism setting on the ForkJoinPool creates the number of worker threads it will hold in the pool to execute tasks. By default this is equal to the number of detected CPUs on your computer. For example, on my computer:

> new ForkJoinTaskSupport(new scala.concurrent.forkjoin.ForkJoinPool()).parallelismLevel
res6: Int = 8

> new ForkJoinTaskSupport(new scala.concurrent.forkjoin.ForkJoinPool(2)).parallelismLevel
res7: Int = 2

What is the best value to set the parallelism to?

According to this research, on an Oracle T5-4 server which has 4 processors, each has 16 cores, with 8 threads contexts per core, that is 64 virtual CPUs per core, and looking at the seconds to complete time, the best factor was having 32 worker threads per core, but that is on an Oracle T5-4.

The conclusion we have so far, is that just saying '1 thread per core' is best, is premature. It depends on the hardware and the for/join problem implementation. For the Oracle T5-4 it was 2 threads per core. One could say that the factor '2' is some kind of 'multiplier', because by default, the ForkJoin pool will set to 1 worker thread per core. But tuning the pool to use 2 threads per core gave better performance.

Akka uses the Typesafe configuration to tune these kind of settings to your deployment environment hardware, and one of these settings is the multiplier.

The ThreadPoolExecutor (Implementation)

The ThreadPoolExecutor is an ExecutorService that executes each submitted task using one of possibly several pooled threads, normally configured using Executors factory methods.

Thread pools address two different problems: they usually provide improved performance when executing large numbers of asynchronous tasks, due to reduced per-task invocation overhead, and they provide a means of bounding and managing the resources, including threads, consumed when executing a collection of tasks. Each ThreadPoolExecutor also maintains some basic statistics, such as the number of completed tasks.

To be useful across a wide range of contexts, this class provides many adjustable parameters and extensibility hooks. However, programmers are urged to use the more convenient Executors factory methods Executors.newCachedThreadPool() (unbounded thread pool, with automatic thread reclamation), Executors.newFixedThreadPool(int) (fixed size thread pool) and Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor() (single background thread), that preconfigure settings for the most common usage scenarios.

What makes it special

Configurable pool of resuable worker threads,
Saves time spent in Thread lifecycle overhead

Scala Future and the Execution Context

Scala Future

According to Daniel Westheide, a scala.concurrent.Future is a container type, representing a computation that is supposed to eventually result in a value of type T. Alas, the computation might go wrong or time out, so when the future is completed, it may not have been successful after all, in which case it contains an exception instead.

Future is a write-once container – after a future has been completed, it is effectively immutable. Also, the Future type only provides an interface for reading the value to be computed. The task of writing the computed value is achieved via a Promise. Hence, there is a clear separation of concerns in the API design.

The Future API looks like:

object Future {
  def apply[T](body: => T)(implicit ec: ExecutionContext): Future[T]
}

This means, that any block of code can be executed and returns a type T. Using currying, an implicit ExecutionContext must be available for the Future to be executed.

What is an Execution Context

According to Daniel Westheide, an ExecutionContext is something that can execute a scala.concurrent.Future, and you can think of it as something like a thread pool.

When imported implicitly, an ExecutionContext is available implicitly, so we only have a single one-element argument list remaining; the body to be executed. In Scala, a single-argument lists can be enclosed with curly braces instead of parentheses. People often make use of this when calling the future method, making it look a little bit like we are using a feature of the language and not calling an ordinary method. The ExecutionContext is an implicit parameter for virtually all of the Future API.

Basically, an ExecutionContext is a wrapper around java.util.concurrent.Executor and java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService:

object ExecutionContext {
 def fromExecutor(e: java.util.concurrent.Executor): ExecutionContextExecutor
 def fromExecutorService(e: java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService): ExecutionContextExecutorService
}

Akka ExecutionContext

According to the Akka Futures Documentation, an ExecutionContext is needed for executing Futures. A Future is a data structure used to retrieve the result of some concurrent operation. The result can be accessed synchronously (blocking) or asynchronously (non-blocking). An ExecutionContext is very similar to a java.util.concurrent.Executor; it is a wrapper around one.

When using Actors, it is easy to have an ActorSystem in scope. By implicit(ly) importing system.dispatcher, the default Akka dispatcher is in scope as the ExecutionContext, but it is also easy to create one by using the factory methods provided by the ExecutionContext companion object to wrap java.util.concurrent.Executor and java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService.

ExecutionContext within Actors

Each actor is configured to be run on a MessageDispatcher, and that dispatcher doubles as an ExecutionContext. If the nature of the Future call invoked by the actor matches or is compatible with the activities of that actor (e.g. all CPU bound and no latency requirements), then it may be easiest to reuse the dispatcher for running the Futures by importing context.dispatcher. (read this line again!)

implicit val ec = ExecutionContext.fromExecutorService(java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService)

But which ExecutionService to use?

import java.util.concurrent.Executors
import scala.concurrent.{ExecutionContext, Future}

val es = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(20)
implicit val ec = ExecutionContext.fromExecutorService(es)

Future {
  Thread.sleep(1000)
  println("Hello")
}

Which ExecutionServices are there?

The java.util.concurrent.Executors class has the following factory methods:

newFixedThreadPool(nThreads: Int): ExecutorService => Creates a thread pool that reuses a fixed number of threads operating off a shared unbounded queue. At any point, at most nThreads will be active processing tasks. If additional tasks are submitted when all threads are active, they will wait in the queue until a thread is available. If any thread terminates due to a failure during execution prior to shutdown, a new one will take its place if needed to execute subsequent tasks. The threads in the pool will exist until it is explicitly shutdown.
newWorkStealingPool(parallelism: Int): ExecutorService => Creates a thread pool that maintains enough threads to support the given parallelism level, and may use multiple queues to reduce contention. The parallelism level corresponds to the maximum number of threads actively engaged in, or available to engage in, task processing. The actual number of threads may grow and shrink dynamically. A work-stealing pool makes no guarantees about the order in which submitted tasks are executed.
newWorkStealingPool(): ExecutorService => Creates a work-stealing thread pool using all available processors as its target parallelism level.
newSingleThreadExecutor(): ExecutorService => Creates an Executor that uses a single worker thread operating off an unbounded queue. (Note however that if this single thread terminates due to a failure during execution prior to shutdown, a new one will take its place if needed to execute subsequent tasks.) Tasks are guaranteed to execute sequentially, and no more than one task will be active at any given time. Unlike the otherwise equivalent ''newFixedThreadPool(1)'' the returned executor is guaranteed not to be reconfigurable to use additional threads.
newCachedThreadPool(): ExecutorService => Creates a thread pool that creates new threads as needed, but will reuse previously constructed threads when they are available. These pools will typically improve the performance of programs that execute many short-lived asynchronous tasks. Calls to execute will reuse previously constructed threads if available. If no existing thread is available, a new thread will be created and added to the pool. Threads that have not been used for sixty seconds are terminated and removed from the cache. Thus, a pool that remains idle for long enough will not consume any resources. Note that pools with similar properties but different details (for example, timeout parameters) may be created using constructors.

The Scala Global ExecutionContext

Jessica K - The global ExecutionContext makes your life easier does a great job at explaining the scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.global, let's listen to her:

When I try to put some code in a Future without specifying where to run it, Scala tells me what to do:

scala> Future(println("Do something slow"))
<console>:14: error: Cannot find an implicit ExecutionContext, either require one yourself or import ExecutionContext.Implicits.global

The global ExecutionContext has an objective of keeping your CPU busy while limiting time spent context switching between threads. To do this, it starts up a ForkJoinPool whose desired degree of parallelism is the number of CPUs.

ForkJoinPool is particularly smart, able to run small computations with less overhead. It's more work for its users, who must implement each computation inside a ForkJoinTask. Scala's global ExecutionContext takes this burden from you: any task submitted to the global context from within the global context is quietly wrapped in a ForkJoinTask.

But wait, there's more! We also get special handling for blocking tasks. Scala's Futures resist supplying their values unless you pass them to Await.result(). That's because Future knows that its result may not be available yet, so this is a blocking call. The Await object wraps the access in scala.concurrent.blocking { ... }, which passes the code on to BlockingContext.

The BlockingContext object says, "Hey, current Thread, do you have anything special to do before I start this slow thing?" and the special thread created inside the global ExecutionContext says, "Why yes! I'm going to tell the ForkJoinPool about this."

The thread's block context defers to the managedBlock method in ForkJoinPool, which activates the ForkJoinPool's powers of compensation. ForkJoinPool is trying to keep the CPU busy by keeping degree-of-parallelism threads computing all the time. When informed that one of those threads is about to block, it compensates by starting an additional thread. This way, while your thread is sitting around, a CPU doesn't have to. As a bonus, this prevents pool-induced deadlock.

In this way, Scala's Futures and its global ExecutionContext work together to keep your computer humming without going Thread-wild. You can invoke the same magic yourself by wrapping any Thread-hanging code in blocking { ... }.

All this makes scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.global an excellent general-purpose ExecutionContext.

When should you not use it? When you're writing an asynchronous library, or when you know you're going to do a lot of blocking, declare your own thread pool. Leave the global one for everyone else.

Choosing An ExecutionService to Wrap

According to Jessica K - Choosing an ExecutorService, There are two reasons to do multi threading: parallel computing or avoid blocking on I/O (i.e. writing to a file/database), and it boils down to:

Parallel computation: ** When you have simple parallel computations, that themselves start other computations, then use a ForkJoinPool (WorkStealingPool) ** When you have simple parallel computations use a FixedThreadPool with as many threads as CPUs
Not waiting on I/O: ** When you need to limit the number of threads that can wait on I/O, use a FixedThreadPool ** When you don't want to limit the number of threads that can wait on I/O, use a cacheThreadPool

Note: Blocking I/O operations (JDBC), number crunching code that by virtue of calculation uses the thread, because there are only a small number of threads, this can lead to thread starvation, which means there are no more threads available and no more tasks can be executed, halting the system.

Akka Dispatchers

An Akka MessageDispatcher is what makes Akka Actors "tick", it is the engine of the machine so to speak. All MessageDispatcher implementations are also an ExecutionContext, which means that they can be used to execute arbitrary code, for instance Futures, Spray (Un)Marshallers, Scheduler, etc.

The Default Dispatcher

Every ActorSystem will have a default dispatcher that will be used in case nothing else is configured for an Actor. The default dispatcher can be configured, and is by default a Dispatcher with the specified default-executor. If an ActorSystem is created with an ExecutionContext passed in, this ExecutionContext will be used as the default executor for all dispatchers in this ActorSystem. If no ExecutionContext is given, it will fallback to the executor specified in akka.actor.default-dispatcher.default-executor.fallback. By default this is a "fork-join-executor", which gives excellent performance in most cases.

Looking up a Dispatcher

Dispatchers implement the ExecutionContext interface and can thus be used to run Future invocations etc.

// for use with Futures, Scheduler, etc.
implicit val executionContext = system.dispatchers.lookup("my-dispatcher")

Setting the dispatcher for an Actor

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 the root of the application.conf:

my-dispatcher {
 # 'my-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), core i7 with HT = 8 CPUs * 2 = 16 threads
   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 {
  # 'my-thread-pool-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
}

Then you create the actor as usual and define the dispatcher in the deployment configuration.

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

application.conf (you don't need to put /usr in):

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

An alternative to the deployment configuration is to define the dispatcher in code. If you define the dispatcher in the deployment configuration then this value will be used instead of programmatically provided parameter.

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

Types of dispatchers

There are 4 different types of message dispatchers:

Dispatcher: This is an event-based dispatcher that binds a set of Actors to a thread pool. It is the default dispatcher used if one is not specified. ** Sharability: Unlimited ** Mailboxes: Any, creates one per Actor ** Use cases: Default dispatcher, Bulkheading ** Driven by: java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService ** Config: specify using "executor" using "fork-join-executor", "thread-pool-executor" or the FQCN of an akka.dispatcher.ExecutorServiceConfigurator
PinnedDispatcher: This dispatcher dedicates a unique thread for each actor using it; i.e. each actor will have its own thread pool with only one thread in the pool. ** Sharability: None ** Mailboxes: Any, creates one per Actor ** Use cases: Bulkheading ** Driven by: Any akka.dispatch.ThreadPoolExecutorConfigurator, by default a "thread-pool-executor"
BalancingDispatcher: This is an executor based event driven dispatcher that will try to redistribute work from busy actors to idle actors. All the actors share a single Mailbox that they get their messages from. It is assumed that all actors using the same instance of this dispatcher can process all messages that have been sent to one of the actors; i.e. the actors belong to a pool of actors, and to the client there is no guarantee about which actor instance actually processes a given message. ** Sharability: Actors of the same type only
** Mailboxes: Any, creates one for all Actors
** Use cases: Work-sharing
** Driven by: java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService ** Config: specify using "executor" using "fork-join-executor", "thread-pool-executor" or the FQCN of an akka.dispatcher.ExecutorServiceConfigurator Note that you can not use a BalancingDispatcher as a Router Dispatcher. (You can however use it for the Routees)
CallingThreadDispatcher: This dispatcher runs invocations on the current thread only. This dispatcher does not create any new threads, but it can be used from different threads concurrently for the same actor. See CallingThreadDispatcher for details and restrictions. ** Sharability: Unlimited ** Mailboxes: Any, creates one per Actor per Thread (on demand) ** Use cases: Testing ** Driven by: The calling thread (duh)

Effective Akka

While the Future API is very handy for defining work to take place asynchronously, they require an ExecutionContext in order to perform their tasks. This ExecutionContext provides a thread pool from which they draw their required resources. Many people start off by using the ActorSystem default dispatcher like so:

val system = ActorSystem()
implicit val ec: ExecutionContext = system.dispatcher
Future { /* work to be performed */ }

However, using the ActorSystem’s default dispatcher can lead to thread starvation very quickly if it becomes overloaded with potential work. The default configuration of this dispatcher is to be elastically sized from 8 to 64 threads.

akka.actor.default-dispatcher {
    type = "dispatcher"
    executor = "default-executor"
    default-executor {
      fallback = "fork-join-executor"
    }
    fork-join-executor {
        parallelism-min = 8
        parallelism-factor = 3.0
        parallelism-max = 64
    }
    throughput = 5
}

We should consider it important to isolate execution by context. This gives you more resource granularity but still requires your actor to dedicate a thread to the future every time one is instantiated.

This also might not be ideal:

implicit val ec: ExecutionContext = context.dispatcher
Future { /* work to be performed */ }

You always have the option of creating a new ExecutionContext from a new thread pool on the fly, which can be done like so:

implicit val ec: ExecutionContext =
ExecutionContext.fromExecutor(new ForkJoinPool())
Future { /* work to be performed */ }

However, a best practice I recommend is that you consider when you may want to define specific dispatchers inside the configuration of each ActorSystem in which futures will be used. Then you can dynamically apply the dispatcher for use in your code, like this:

implicit val ec: ExecutionContext = context.system.dispatchers.lookup("foo")
Future { /* work to be performed */ }

Available ExecutorServices in Akka Configuration

The following ExecutorServices are available by default, but you can configure your own:

executor: "default-executor"
executor: "fork-join-executor":
executor: "thread-pool-executor"

Custom ExecutionService (ThreadPool) Configuration

In certain circumstances, you may wish to dispatch work to other thread pools. This may include CPU heavy work, or IO work, such as database access. To do this, you should first create a thread pool, this can be done easily in Scala:

implicit val ec: ExecutionContext = system.dispatchers.lookup("my-context")

In application.conf, you can add a section to the root of the configuration to create an ExecutionService:

my-context {
  fork-join-executor {
    parallelism-factor = 20.0
    parallelism-max = 200
  }
}

Play Framework Execution Services Best Practise (Profiles)

Purely Asynchronous: you are doing no blocking IO in your application. Since you are never blocking, the default configuration of one thread per processor suits your use case perfectly, so no extra configuration needs to be done. Note that Akka uses a multiplier factor of 3, with a maximum number of worker threads of 64, so using a i7, 4 core with HT giving the OS effectively 8 cpus, we have 8 * 3 = 24 worker threads. But the default ForkJoin pool may actively grow or shrink to the given min/max caps which is 8 .. 64 worker threads.
Highly synchronous: This profile matches that of a traditional synchronous IO based web framework, such as a Java servlet container. It uses large thread pools to handle blocking IO. It is useful for applications where most actions are doing database synchronous IO calls, such as accessing a database, and you don’t want or need control over concurrency for different types of work. This profile is the simplest for handling blocking IO. In this profile, you would simply use the default execution context everywhere, but configure it to have ''a very large number of threads'' in its pool, like so:

akka {
  actor {
    default-dispatcher = {
      fork-join-executor {
        parallelism-min = 300
        parallelism-max = 300
      }
    }
  }
}

Reactive Frameworks

Now that you know a lot about the execution model of Scala and Akka, you could read up on Reactive Frameworks, which are the playframework and Lagomframework and of course Akka and how they compare against the mainstream Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Spring frameworks.

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