Title: An objective comparison of two prominent virtual actor frameworks: Proto.Actor and Orleans

Authors: Edward R. Sykes; Alec DiVito

Addresses: Centre for Mobile Innovation, Sheridan College, Oakville, Ontario, Canada ' Centre for Mobile Innovation, Sheridan College, Oakville, Ontario, Canada

Abstract: Recently there has been a significant increase in developing distributed systems easily and rapidly. Driven by the demand of software communities, developers seek tools and frameworks that abstract away low-level details of the underlying distributed system and the need to understand complex details on how the system works. Researchers have explored serverless frameworks, distributed key value stores, distributed stream processing frameworks and distributed actor frameworks. Currently, stateful serverless applications and distributed actor models may be the answer to what developers need. In this paper, we present a review of stateful distributed computing frameworks, and the results of experiments that compare Orleans and Proto.Actor - two popular actor model frameworks - running on Kubernetes. We discovered that the Proto.Actor performs at least two times faster than Orleans, but is more complex to learn. We present the results of these tests, and provide a discussion of future research opportunities highlighting virtual actor model frameworks.

Keywords: actor model; distributed computing; microbenchmark tests; serverless computing; virtual actor frameworks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2024.138217

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2024 Vol.30 No.3, pp.313 - 342

Received: 14 Oct 2022
Accepted: 21 Apr 2023
Published online: 30 Apr 2024 *

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