Actor Model versus TPL for applications development

Abstract

As more and more people are using technology as means to communicate, learn, run businesses or just having fun, there is hidden pressure over the infrastructure that offers all these services to the end users. In order to provide a better service reliability there is a need of using technologies that take advantage of the underlying hardware such as asynchronous libraries which by design are using the hardware resources at their full capabilities. The question here is what asynchronous approach should be used? We can take use of Microsoft’s asynchronous library implementation based on tasks manipulation: TPL (Task Parallel Library), create our own asynchronous library based on the ThreadPool or we can use a different approach by taking use of the Actor Model implemented by Akka.NET framework. This paper is making a performance comparison between two different asynchronous patterns implemented in.NET: task-based and actor-based, by comparing the timing results of the two approaches while realizing actions that can be found in any application: reading from database, data manipulation, saving in the database. In order to perform the analysis and to ensure the consistency of tests, two concurrent applications were developed, having the same data source one with the TPL library and the other with Akka.NET. The applications were run on four different architectures with different core and memory configurations; furthermore, a comprehensive analysis and discussion based on the obtained performance results was done and several conclusions were revealed. Advantages and drawbacks for each asynchronous technology were outlined, to support a decision that could be used in current applications.