Multiplex HTTP requests in a single Actor

[halorgium]

It is probably unnecessary to have a new Actor for each TCPSocket.
Being an I/O-bound problem, it might make sense to reuse a Connection for many requests.

It is possible to have many method calls running concurrently on the same actor.

@jimweirich has a great talk showing this.

[NOX73]

Hello! Could you please explain the problems in I/O bound applications? Is this because of large amount of actors being created?

[halorgium]

It is not so much a problem, but that a user is forced into using a new Actor per Connection.
An I/O-bound problem usually has a large amount of idle time as the I/O travels at the speed of light.
This means that the program can multiplex the time spent handling the input and output inside one Thread (or Actor).

An analogy could be between Resque and Sidekiq.

With Resque, the default state is to have an entirely new process to handle each job.
There are benefits: memory-leak protection, SEGV protection, etc.
But the user is stuck in this pattern.

With Sidekiq, the default is to use a Thread per job which has lower overheads.

Celluloid allows the user to simply multiplex many Tasks inside an Actor, allowing the user to be even more efficient with resources, but requiring more coordination.

Process > Thread > Task