Run, Actor, Run

The actor paradigm supports the natural expression of concurrency. It has inspired the development of several actor-based languages, whose adoption depends, to a large extent, on the runtime characteristics (i.e.,the performance and scaling behaviour) of programs written in these languages. This paper investigates the relative runtime characteristics of Akka, CAF and Pony, based on the Savina benchmarks.We observe that the scaling of many of the Savina benchmarks does not reflect their categorization (into essentially sequential, concurrent and parallel), that many programs have similar runtime characteristics, and that their runtime behaviour may drastically change nature (e.g.,go from essentially sequential to parallel) by tweaking some parameters. These observations lead to our proposal of a single benchmark program which we designed so that through tweaking of some knobs (we hope) we can simulate most of the programs of the Savina suite.