Actix-Telepathy

Inspired by actix-remote and Akka Cluster, Actix-Telepathy is an extension to the Rust actor framework Actix. It empowers Rust users to build distributed applications within the actor framework.

Version Matches

Tests

Run ignored tests sequentially, because these tests run multiple threads themselves.

cargo test -- --ignored --test-threads=1

Usage

Connection Variants

We support the following two connection variants. They define how a node joins a cluster. Each comes with advantages and downsides. Choose carefully!

SingleSeed expects all nodes to have the same seed node (except the seed node itself, it has no seed node). If another node is added, it will be added to the cluster by the seed node. If a node has a different seed node, errors can occur. This variant is recommended for a fast connection setup, but it is not recommended if the seed node is not always available. (This variant is the default.)

Gossip can connect the nodes to each other. Each node can have a different seed node. When joining the cluster, the node will connect to its seed node and receives the number of nodes that are about to join. The seed node of that node will then send the joining node's information to the other nodes via the Gossip protocol. Thereby, the seed node randomly chooses 3 nodes and sends the information to them. These 3 nodes will connect to the joining node. Then the 3 nodes will send the information to 3 other nodes and so on. This variant is recommended if the seed node is not always available. This variant is not recommended if the cluster is very large, because the gossip protocol takes more time the larger the cluster is.

Cluster::new_with_connection_protocol("127.0.0.1:1992".parse().unwrap(), vec![/*...*/], ConnectionProtocol::Gossip)

Sending RemoteMessages

Actix supports do_send, try_send, and send for sending messages to an Addr<impl Actor>.

For RemoteMessages, this crate supports only do_send so far. Additionally, we introduce the wait_send method that returns a message response when the NetworkInterface has sent the RemoteMessage. This does not mean that the RemoteMessage arrived, only that it has been sent.

Ideas and discussion on how to implement a remote response and using the send method on RemoteAddr, please refer to the discussion page.

Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
actix = "0.13.1"
actix-telepathy = "0.6.1"

main.rs

use actix_rt;
use actix_telepathy::prelude::*;
use actix::prelude::*;
use tokio;
use std::net::{ToSocketAddrs, SocketAddr};

#[actix_rt::main]
async fn main() {
    let bind_addr = "127.0.0.1:1992".parse().unwrap();
    let seed_nodes = vec![];
    let _cluster = Cluster::new(bind_addr, seed_nodes);

    tokio::signal::ctrl_c().await.unwrap();
    println!("Ctrl-C received, shutting down");
    System::current().stop();
}

Paper

We have written a paper about this project and conducted experiments to show its competitiveness with Akka and Orleans.

Please consider citing this work when you are using it!

@inproceedings{10.1145/3623506.3623575,
    author = {Wenig, Phillip and Papenbrock, Thorsten},
    title = {Actix-Telepathy},
    year = {2023},
    isbn = {9798400704000},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3623506.3623575},
    doi = {10.1145/3623506.3623575},
    abstract = {The actor programming model supports the development of concurrent applications by encapsulating state and behavior into independent actors. Each actor is a computational entity with strictly private state and behavior. Actors communicate via asynchronous messaging and, in this way, require neither shared memory nor locking. This makes the actor model suitable not only for parallel programming but also for distributed applications engineering. The Rust programming language is a statically-typed language that gained a lot of attention in the past years due to its efficient, economical and safe memory management. To ease the development of parallel applications, several actor model frameworks have been built for Rust. However, no actively maintained Rust actor framework provides the necessary features to write distributed applications. For this reason, we propose an extension for Rust’s Actix library, called Actix-Telepathy, that enables remote messaging and offers clustering support. It allows developers to setup remote actors that can communicate across a computer network with the help of a straight forward and easy to understand interface. Our evaluation demonstrates that Actix-Telepathy competes well in remote messaging performance and memory consumption with other actor libraries, such as Scala’s popular Akka library.},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Reactive and Event-Based Languages and Systems},
    pages = {14–24},
    numpages = {11},
    keywords = {Distributed Computing, Rust, Actor Model},
    location = {Cascais, Portugal},
    series = {REBLS 2023}
}