Getting an Overview of Actors in an Akka System

Jos Dirksen

Feb. 04, 15 · Interview

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i've been playing around with akka-http and akka-streams lately and was wondering which kinds of actors were created when i create flow graphs and process http requests. i ran into the typesafe console, but that is already end of live ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/typesafe-console ) and doesn't support the newer versions of akka.

so after some looking around i ran into a post on stackoverflow providing an alternative approach ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25860939/how-print-all-actors-in-akka... ):

this posts lists some pseudo code, which pointed me in pretty much the right direction. i currently use the following actor to print out all the actors in the system:

class idactor extends actor with actorlogging {
 
 def receive = {
    case "start" =>
      log.info("current actors in system:")
      self ! actorpath.fromstring("akka://streams/user/")
 
    case path: actorpath =>
      context.actorselection(path / "*") ! identify(())
 
    case actoridentity(_, some(ref)) =>
      log.info(ref.tostring())
      self ! ref.path
  }
}

to start this all we have to do is get the actor and message "start":

val idactor = system.actorof(props[idactor],"idactor"); idactor ! "start"

the result is very interesting. for instance in a http-akka system with a couple of flows running i get the following overview of actors:

current actors in system:
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-1-2-1-foreach-stagefactory#-1147809628]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-1-2-1-foreach-stagefactory#-1147809628]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-1-2-1-foreach-stagefactory#-1147809628]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-1-2-1-foreach-stagefactory#-1147809628]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-1-2-1-foreach-stagefactory#-1147809628]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a#-992619289]
actor[akka://streams/user/idactor#830993582]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-1-1-map#310662784]
...
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-751-1-prefixandtail#801612770]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-752-1-prefixandtail#-1939947471]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-753-1-prefixandtail#102076528]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-754-1-prefixandtail#-1858318406]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-755-1-prefixandtail#595550267]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-756-1-prefixandtail#-1675014490]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-76-1-map#-1734873421]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-93-1-map#174954170]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-726-1-mapasync#2041440238]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-725-1-mapasync#-674218071]
actor[akka://streams/user/$a/flow-745-1-mapasync#-800760294]

cool right. not that you can do much with it, but it at least gives you a good overview of what is happening internally.

Akka (toolkit)

Published at DZone with permission of Jos Dirksen, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

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