what the essential difference between akka and ThreadPool+BlockingQueue in ONE Process?

Question

We know Akka is one implementation of actor pattern. Without Akka, I usually implement a simple actor pattern using ThreadPool+BlockingQueue. So the message is offered into the queue, and the works(actors) take the message from the Queue, then do what they should do. Of course, this kind of implementation can be only in just ONE process.

So as to in one process,

1. What's the essential difference between these two(Akka vs. ThreadPool+BlockingQueue)
2. Moreover, what's the difference between actor pattern and producer-consumer model?

Answer 1

Actor model is indeed quite similar to producer-consumer model (P-C).

However, if you use a blocking queue with P-C your application won't be completely non-blocking and asynchronous. The promise of actor model and Akka is that all messages are sent asynchronously and don't block the sender.

Another aspect of it is managing these queues gets quite cumbersome once you have many consumers and producers. With actors you simply send a message and don't have to think about these low level details. Under the hood Akka will keep a message queue aka mailbox per actor with a dispatcher assigning actors to the thread pool to process those messages.

It's much easier to use Akka to achieve highly performant and resilient application than coding it yourself. You get fault tolerance, resource management, location transparency, routing, distributed, async processing, hierarchical supervision out of the box. Not to mention other frameworks and libraries leveraging these features to give you even more (reactive streams, akka http, etc). There are lot's of patterns developed for you already there, so why bother with your own.