Efficient creation of large number of stateful Actors

Akka
1

My query is on how to efficiently create large number of stateful Actors. For example, a Bank Account Actor which stores balance as its State. As Actor follows Isolated mutability, they can not have a shared object say list of Bank_Account. I see two approaches to create Actors for this usecase;

  1. Create one Actor for each Account. Would not this be inefficient in terms of resource usage?

  2. Create required Actor/s on demand based on the operation and delete them once the operation is completed (say create 2 Actor in case of money_transfer usecase). What is the cost of such creation?

Queries:

  1. Are there any effificient approaches?
  2. We have Threadpool to reduce the cost of frequent creation and deletion of threads. Is there any similar approaches for Actors?
2

Somebody else will have a more extensive answer, but check this out: https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/typed/cluster-sharding.html#passivation

Particularly https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/typed/cluster-sharding.html#automatic-passivation

Passivation, in my words, and as I understand it, means that persisted actors are removed from memory when inactive for a certain period, but recreated from the persisted state on demand.

3

Actors are lightweight and you can have many of them but they need to be stopped when not used any more. Cluster Sharding and passivation is a good solution for this.

4

Thank you Ignatius and Patrik.