When to use local vs remote actors?

Question

When should I use Actors vs. Remote Actors in Akka?

I understand that both can scale a machine up, but only remote actors can scale out, so is there any practical production use of the normal Actor?

If a remote actor only has a minor initial setup overhead and does not have any other major overhead to that of a normal Actor, then I would think that using a Remote Actor would be the standard, since it can scale up and out with ease. Even if there is never a need to scale production code out, it would be nice to have the option (if it doesn't come with baggage).

Any insight on when to use an Actor vs. Remote Actor would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Remote Actors cannot scale up, they are only remote references to a local actor on another machine.

For Akka 2.0 we will introduce clustered actors, which will allow you to write an Akka application and scale it up only using config.