2016 is going to be a big year for Akka.NET, and we’re starting things off right by hosting our second Akka.NET Virtual Meetup on Tuesday, January 26th @ 18:00UTC. RSVP Here.

Update: thanks to everyone who attended! You can view the meetup below!

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is about how to create stateful actors that are also durable by default, meaning that the actor can recover its state from some sort of storage engine in the event that the entire Akka.NET process needs to be restarted.

Enter Akka.Persistence - an entire framework built into Akka.NET that’s designed to allow you to create actors with durable state that can be persisted on any database or storage system you want.

In this post we’re going to explore the concepts behind Akka.Persistence, how it works, and what some of the available storage options are.

Not long ago in Akka.NET-land we had an issue occur where users noticed a dramatic drop in throughput in Akka.Remote’s message processing pipeline - and to make matters worse, this occurred in a production release of AKka.NET!

Yikes, how did that happen?

The answer is that although you can use unit tests and code reviews to detect functional problems with code changes and pull requests, using those same mechanisms to detect performance problems with code is utterly ineffective. Even skilled developers who have detailed knowledge about the internals of the .NET framework and CLR are unable to correctly predict how changes to code will impact its performance.

Hence why I developed NBench - a .NET performance-testing, stress-testing, and benchmarking framework for .NET applications that works and feels a lot like a unit test.