Chapter 3: Akka Basic Toolkit - Elasticity

In this source code example we extend our analogy by introducing elacticity in the form of Parallelization. Our basic actor layout will stay the same with a small change to how we implement our Librarian:

RareBooks Actor

In our Messaging example, we implemented Librarian as a single child actor. In this example we will change this by implementing our Librarian as a router that supports a configurable number of Librarian routees.

Summary

By increasing the number of Librarian actors and parallelizing our throughput, we significantly increase our processing speed in the face of increasing load.

Running the Application

1. Run a terminal session and navigate to the root directory, reactive-application-development-scala.
2. Run sbt.
3. Inside the sbt session, enter project chapter3_002_elasticty.
4. Inside the sbt session, enter run to bootstrap the application.
5. Under Enter commands [q = quit, 2c = 2 customers, etc.]: enter 5c for 5 customers.
6. The rarebook.log file will be created in the root directory containing the application output.
7. You should notice a significant increase in throughput for requests being processed!