Mailbox Part 2

It's been a while since I've posted Mailbox Part 1 and I promised a benchmark for a 1:N communication scenario for up to 12 cores. So here it is. This benchmark compares libcppa to Erlang and Scala with its two standard library implementations and Akka.

The benchmark uses 20 threads sending 1,000,000 messages each, except for Erlang which does not have a threading library. In Erlang, I spawned 20 actors instead. The minimal runtime of this benchmark is the time the receiving actor needs to process 20,000,000 messages and the overhead of passing the messages to the mailbox. More hardware concurrency leads to higher synchronization between the sending threads, since the mailbox acts as a shared resource.

Both libcppa implementations show similar performance to Scala (receive) on two cores but have a faster increasing curve. The message passing implementation of Erlang does not scale well for this use case. The more concurrency we add, the more time the Erlang program needs, up to an average of 600 seconds on 12 cores. The results are clipped for visibility purposes in the graph. The increase in runtime for libcppa is similar to the increase seen in the Actor Creation Overhead benchmark and is caused by the scheduler (the cached stack algorithm scales very well and is not a limiting factor here). The overhead of stack allocation is negligible in this use case. Thus, the run time of both libcppa implementations is almost identical.

The benchmarks ran on a virtual machine with Linux using 2 to 12 cores of the host system comprised of two hexa-core Intel® Xeon® processors with 2.27GHz. All values are the average of five runs.

The sources can be found on github (MailboxPerformance.scala, mailbox_performance.erl and mailbox_performance.cpp).