Performance Comparison of two Java-based Actor Systems

This paper belongs to a research work which develops a deterministic actor framework in Java named Theatre, which addresses the modelling, analysis and implementation of time-critical, cyber-physical systems. Theatre distin-guishes 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 light-weight nature of Theatre and its con-current/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.