Actor Commands

Petabridge.Cmd.Host contains a set of commands designed to help Akka.NET users visualize their actor hierarchies and acquire other important pieces of information about the state of their actors.

Available Commands

Command Name	Description
actor hierarchy	Prints the actor hierarchy from a given starting position all the way down to a specified level of depth. Warning: output can be quite long for large actor hierarchies.
actor system	Gets the full name and address of the currently connected ActorSystem.
actor ping	Queries a specific actor at a given ActorPath to see if it exists and is responsive.
actor stop	Kills a local or remote actor using the given path. This will kill an actor using a PoisonPill.

actor hierarchy

A useful tool in the course of managing or debugging an Akka.NET application is the ability to visualize what the current state of an actor hierarchy looks like. You can see how many children a particular actor has, what they're named, whether they're remotely deployed or not, and so forth.

actor hierarchy takes the following arguments:

Argument Name	Switches	Mandatory?	Allow Multiple?	Is Flag?	Description
start	-s or -S	no	no	no	The starting actor path to use in the query; everything in the trace will traverse the actor hierarchy from this point onward. Defaults to akka://{ActorSystem}/user/ if left blank. Can also be a remote ActorPath if Akka.Remote is used.
depth	-d or -D	no	no	no	The depth in the actor hierarchy to query. A depth of 1 means that only children of the starting actor are queried. Depth of 2 means that grandchildren are queried. And so forth. Defaults to 2.
timeout-per-layer	-t or -T	no	no	no	The time in milliseconds given to collect actor's responses to ActorIdentity message on each layer of the hierarchy. Defaults to 40.
exclude-system-actors	-e or -E	no	no	yes	When set, this query will exlcude all actors from the /system portion of the actor hierarchy.

Examples

Querying the top-level actors of the current actor hierarchy.

pbm [host@port] actor hierarchy -d 1

Querying the actor hierarchy up to 6 layers deep and exporting the results to a file (Windows.) Uses "single shot" mode of pbm.

C:\> pbm [host@port] actor hierarchy -d 6 > actor-hierarchy.txt

Querying a non-root actor's children.

pbm [host@port] actor hierarchy -s /user/foo/child1 -d 1

Querying the actor hierarchy up to 6 layers deep with timeout per layer increased up to 400ms

pbm [host@port] actor hierarchy -d 6 -t 400

Querying the actor hierarchy minus any /system actors.

pbm [host@port] actor hierarchy -e

Note

If you get inconsistent results when running actor hierarchy command (i.e. some actors are not displayed in the output from time to time), try to expand the timeout parameter value.

actor system

Prints the fully qualified name of the ActorSystem of the current Petabridge.Cmd.Host, including any inbound Akka.Remote listening information.

actor system takes no arguments.

Examples

Query the name of the current ActorSystem.

pbm [host:port] actor system

actor ping

Pings a local or remote actor using the given path. Used to validate that a given actor is both alive and responsive.

Argument Name	Switches	Mandatory?	Allow Multiple?	Is Flag?	Description
start	-p or -P	yes	no	no	The ActorPath to ping, i.e. /user/foo to query. Can also be a remote ActorPath such as akka.tcp://MySys@localhost:12030/user/foo.
timeout	-t or -T	no	no	no	The timeout for the ping query in milliseconds. Defaults to 100 ms.

Examples

Query a local actor at /user/blackhole.

pbm [host:port] actor ping -p /user/blackhole

Query a remote actor running on akka.tcp://MySys@localhost:14420

pbm [host:port] actor ping -p akka.tcp://MySys@localhost:14420/user/blackhole

actor stop

Kills a local or remote actor using the given path. This will kill an actor using a PoisonPill.

Argument Name	Switches	Mandatory?	Allow Multiple?	Is Flag?	Description
start	-p or -P	yes	no	no	The ActorPath i.e. /user/foo to terminate. Can also be a remote ActorPath such as akka.tcp://MySys@localhost:12030/user/foo.
timeout	-t or -T	no	no	no	The maximum wait time to confirm that an actor has been terminated. Defaults to 2000 ms.

Examples

Terminate a local actor at /user/blackhole.

pbm [host:port] actor stop -p /user/blackhole

Terminate a remote actor running on akka.tcp://MySys@localhost:14420

pbm [host:port] actor stop -p akka.tcp://MySys@localhost:14420/user/blackhole