Akka.NET v1.4.25 Release Notes

[Aaronontheweb]

1.4.25 September 08 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4
Akka.NET v1.4.25 includes some significant performance improvements for Akka.Remote and a number of important bug fixes and improvements.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Akka.IO.Tcp: connecting to an unreachable DnsEndpoint never times out
• Akka.Actor: need to enforce stdout-loglevel = off all the way through ActorSystem lifecycle
• Akka.Actor: Ask should push unhandled answers into deadletter
• Akka.Routing: Make Router.Route` virtual
• Akka.Actor: Improve performance on IActorRef.Child API - signficantly improves performance of many Akka.NET functions, but includes a public API change on IActorRef that is source compatible but not necessarily binary-compatible. IActorRef GetChild(System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<string> name) is now IActorRef GetChild(System.Collections.Generic.IReadOnlyList<string> name). This API is almost never called directly by user code (it's almost always called via the internals of the ActorSystem when resolving ActorSelections or remote messages) so this change should be safe.
• Akka.Actor: IsNobody throws NRE
• Akka.Cluster.Tools: singleton fix cleanup of overdue _removed members
• Akka.DistributedData: ddata exclude Exiting members in Read/Write MajorityPlus

Performance Improvements
Using our standard RemotePingPong benchmark, the difference between v1.4.24 and v1.4.24 is significant:

v1.4.24

OSVersion:                         Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0 
ProcessorCount:                    16                              
ClockSpeed:                        0 MHZ                           
Actor Count:                       32                              
Messages sent/received per client: 200000  (2e5)                   
Is Server GC:                      True                            
Thread count:                      111                             
                                                                   
Num clients, Total [msg], Msgs/sec, Total [ms]                     
         1,  200000,     96994,    2062.08                         
         5, 1000000,    194818,    5133.93                         
        10, 2000000,    198966,   10052.93                         
        15, 3000000,    199455,   15041.56                         
        20, 4000000,    198177,   20184.53                         
        25, 5000000,    197613,   25302.80                         
        30, 6000000,    197349,   30403.82                         

v1.4.25

OSVersion:                         Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0
ProcessorCount:                    16
ClockSpeed:                        0 MHZ
Actor Count:                       32
Messages sent/received per client: 200000  (2e5)
Is Server GC:                      True
Thread count:                      111

Num clients, Total [msg], Msgs/sec, Total [ms]
         1,  200000,    130634,    1531.54
         5, 1000000,    246975,    4049.20
        10, 2000000,    244499,    8180.16
        15, 3000000,    244978,   12246.39
        20, 4000000,    245159,   16316.37
        25, 5000000,    243333,   20548.09
        30, 6000000,    241644,   24830.55

This represents a 24% overall throughput improvement in Akka.Remote across the board. We have additional PRs staged that should get aggregate performance improvements above 40% for Akka.Remote over v1.4.24 but they didn't make it into the Akka.NET v1.4.25 release.

You can see the full set of changes introduced in Akka.NET v1.4.25 here

COMMITS	LOC+	LOC-	AUTHOR
32	1301	400	Aaron Stannard
4	358	184	Andreas Dirnberger
3	414	149	Gregorius Soedharmo
3	3	3	dependabot[bot]
2	43	10	zbynek001
1	14	13	tometchy
1	139	3	carlcamilleri