Performance Comparison of Two Java-Based Actor Systems

This paper belongs to a research work that develops a deterministic actor framework in Java named Theatre, which addresses the modeling, analysis, and implementation of time-critical, cyber-physical systems. Theatre distinguishes from other actor systems by being control-based, time-sensitive, and centered on not thread-based actors. Although its main orientation to real-time embedded systems, Theatre can also be exploited for building high-performance applications on nowadays multi-core machines with shared memory. This paper reports an experience of performance comparison of Theatre with the Akka actor toolkit, through a parallel and scalable version of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma multi-agent system. Akka is a well-known library implemented in Scala and Java, which efficiently supports classical actors and it is best suited to untimed distributed applications. The experimental work confirms the lightweight nature of Theatre and its concurrent/parallel lock-free computational model, are also a key for achieving high execution performance, even better than that provided by Akka and similar toolkits, when large-scale systems are considered.