Service fabric - Manual Actor Deactivation for debug/testing purposes

Question

I'm working on a Service Fabric project using ReliableActors with a state. I save and delete things in the state of the actor, and have some re-activation logic that I want to test.

Is there a way to manually deactivate or garbage collect an actor? I would optimally have a test loading data into the actor, deactivating it, and then run some function to ensure that the actor still opperates as intended.

Answer 1

You can adjust the time an actor is considered as idle to force more frequent garbage collection. Code from the documentation:

ActorRuntime.RegisterActorAsync<MyActor>((context, actorType) =>
        new ActorService(context, actorType,
                settings:
                    new ActorServiceSettings()
                    {
                        ActorGarbageCollectionSettings =
                            new ActorGarbageCollectionSettings(idleTimeoutInSeconds: 20, scanIntervalInSeconds:20)
                    }))
        .GetAwaiter()
        .GetResult();

As you can see, there are two parameters: idleTimeoutInSeconds — after that time an actor that is doing nothing could be considered for deactivation; scanIntervalInSeconds — time interval in which service fabric will check actors on their inactivity.