Stateless actors are not concurrent.

[juanstiza]

The documentation states:

Stateless actors can service multiple requests at the same time. Statelessness means that such actors do not have to cater for concurrency issues.

I assumed (and please correct me if I am wrong) that we could call these actors with any concurrency we desire.

Expected Behavior

Multiple messages being sent to a stateless actor should be processed in parallel

Current Behavior

Messages are being processed one at a time

Possible Solution

No clue

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

import nact from "nact";
const system = nact.start();
const delay = (time) => new Promise((res) => setTimeout(res, time));

const ping = nact.spawnStateless(
  system,
  async (msg, ctx) => {
    console.log(msg);
    console.log(new Date())
    await delay(500);

    throw new Error("oh no!");
  },
  "ping",
  {
    onCrash: (msg, e, ctx) => {
      console.log(e)
      return ctx.escalate
    }
  }
);

for (let i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
  nact.dispatch(ping, {
    i,
    createdAt: new Date()
  });
}

This outputs:

{ i: 0, createdAt: 2023-07-06T13:43:31.932Z }
2023-07-06T13:43:31.937Z
{ i: 1, createdAt: 2023-07-06T13:43:31.932Z }
2023-07-06T13:43:32.440Z
{ i: 2, createdAt: 2023-07-06T13:43:31.932Z }
2023-07-06T13:43:32.942Z
{ i: 3, createdAt: 2023-07-06T13:43:31.932Z }
2023-07-06T13:43:33.444Z
{ i: 4, createdAt: 2023-07-06T13:43:31.932Z }
2023-07-06T13:43:33.947Z

Context

I'm trying to run simple tasks in stateless actors and be able to run them with any desired cocurrency

Your Environment

Tested in node v14.21.3 and v18.14.2 on MacOS 13.4.1

[ncthbrt]

Thanks for reporting this @juanstiza.

[larsw]

Node.js is single-threaded, so it isn't possible to achieve true concurrency.

[juanstiza]

@larsw That is true, but it is not what this ticket is referencing to. Have you read it?