actorify
Turn any duplex stream into an actor. Built on the the AMP protocol
for opaque binary and javascript argument support.
Actors are similar to traditional RPC however they are isolated units of communication, an actor receives and sends zero or more messages to and from
its peer with bi-directional messaging. Typical RPC is done at the process-level,
meaning in order to work with data coupled with an identifier such as a user id
that the id must be passed each request, whereas an actor may retain this state.
Features
- fast
- clean api
- json support
- request timeouts
- opaque binary support
- simple flexible protocol
- bi-directional messaging
- request/response support
Installation
$ npm install actorify
Guide
Example
Simple hello world PING/PONG example:
var net = require('net');
var actorify = require('actorify');
net.createServer(function(sock){
var actor = actorify(sock);
actor.on('ping', function(){
console.log('PING');
actor.send('pong');
});
}).listen(3000);
var sock = net.connect(3000);
var actor = actorify(sock);
setInterval(function(){
actor.send('ping');
actor.once('pong', function(){
console.log('PONG');
});
}, 300);
Sending a single request with multiple async responses,
also illustrates how arguments may be primitives, json objects,
or opaque binary such as sending an image over the wire for
resizing, receiving multiple thumbnail blobs and their
respective size:
var net = require('net');
var actorify = require('actorify');
net.createServer(function(sock){
var actor = actorify(sock);
var img = new Buffer('faux data');
actor.on('image thumbnails', function(img, sizes){
console.log('%s byte image -> %s', img.length, sizes.join(', '));
sizes.forEach(function(size){
actor.send('thumb', size, new Buffer('thumb data'));
});
});
}).listen(3000);
setInterval(function(){
var sock = net.connect(3000);
var actor = actorify(sock);
console.log('send image for thumbs');
var img = new Buffer('faux image');
actor.send('image thumbnails', img, ['150x150', '300x300']);
actor.on('thumb', function(size, img){
console.log('thumb: %s', size);
});
}, 500);
You may also associate callbacks with an actor message, effectively
turning it into a traditional RPC call:
actor.send('get user', 'tobi', function(err, user){
});
actor.on('get user', function(name, reply){
getUser(name, function(err, user){
reply(err, user);
});
});
Timeouts
When performing a request you may optionally timeout the response,
after which an Error
will be passed to the callback and any subsequent
response will be ignored.
The argument may be numeric milliseconds or represented as a string such
as "5s", "10m", "1 minute", "30 seconds", etc. By default there is no
timeout.
actor.send('hello', function(err, res){
}).timeout('5s');
Error Handling
Stream errors are not handled, you must add an "error" listener
to the stream
passed to actorify().
Benchmarks
Benchmarks on my first generation MBP Retina with node 0.11.x.
Real results are likely higher since having the
producer on the same machine as the consumer makes
results misleading.
With 64b messages:
min: 56,818 ops/s
mean: 159,207 ops/s
median: 138,888 ops/s
total: 1,376,188 ops in 8.644s
through: 1.52 mb/s
With 1kb messages:
min: 56,179 ops/s
mean: 153,919 ops/s
median: 142,857 ops/s
total: 909,974 ops in 5.912s
through: 150.31 mb/s
With 10kb messages:
min: 11,389 ops/s
mean: 64,167 ops/s
median: 64,102 ops/s
total: 352,025 ops in 5.486s
through: 626.64 mb/s
With 32kb messages:
min: 7,032 ops/s
mean: 14,269 ops/s
median: 23,584 ops/s
total: 86,329 ops in 6.05s
through: 445.91 mb/s
License
MIT