akkadotnet/akka.net 1.5.8

akka.net v1.5.8

on GitHub

1.5.8 June 15th 2023

Akka.NET v1.5.8 is a maintenance release that introduces some new features and fixes some bugs with Akka.NET v1.5.7 and earlier.

• Akka.Streams: Added Source/Flow Setup operator
• Akka.Cluster.Sharding: fixed potential wire format problem when upgrading from v1.4 to v1.5 with state-store-mode=ddata and remember-entities=on
• Akka.Remote.TestKit: Fix MNTR crashing because it is using PolyFill extension method

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.8, click here.

1.5.7 May 17th 2023

Akka.NET v1.5.7 is a significant release that introduces a major new reliable message delivery feature to Akka.NET and Akka.Cluster.Sharding: Akka.Delivery.

Akka.Delivery

Akka.Delivery is a reliable delivery system that leverages built-in actors, serialization, and persistence to help guarantee that all messages sent from one producer to one consumer will be delivered, in-order, even across process restarts / actor restarts / network outages.

Akka.Delivery's functionality is divded across four libraries:

• Akka - defines the base definitions for all messages, the ProducerController type, and the ConsumerController type;
• Akka.Cluster - contains the serialization definitions for Akka.Delivery;
• Akka.Persistence - contains the EventSourcedProducerQueue implementation, an optional feature that can be used to make the ProducerController's outbound delivery queue persisted to the Akka.Persistence Journal and SnapshotStore; and
• Akka.Cluster.Sharding - contains the definitions for the ShardingProducerController and ShardingConsumerController.

We've documented how these features work in the following two detailed articles official website:

• "Reliable Message Delivery with Akka.Delivery"
• "Reliable Delivery over Akka.Cluster.Sharding"

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.7, click here.

1.5.6 May 8th 2023

Version 1.5.6 is a patch with a few minor bug fix

• TestKit: Remove duplicate info log for unhandled messages
• Core: Change logging DateTime formatter from 12 hour to 24 hour format

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.6, click here.

1.5.5 May 4th 2023

• TestKit: Add new variant of ExpectAll that accepts predicates
• FSharp: Downgrade FSharp to v6.0.5
• Core: Bump Google.Protobuf from 3.22.1 to 3.22.3
• Core: Fix ByteString to check for index bounds
• Core: Fix ReceiveActor ReceiveAsync ReceiveTimeout bug
• Core: Fix race condition inside FastLazy

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.5, click here.

7 contributors since release 1.5.4

1.5.4 April 25th 2023

• Akka: Enhance IStash API and configuration
• Akka: Add bounded IStash configuration

IStash Enhancements

IStash API have been improved with metrics API and its bound/capacity can be programatically set. Documentation can be read here

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.4, click here.

5 contributors since release 1.5.3

1.5.3 April 20th 2023

• Persistence.Sqlite: Bump Microsoft.Data.SQLite to 7.0.5
• Serialization.Hyperion: Fix bug: surrogate and known type provider not applied correctly by Setup
• Akka: Bump Microsoft.Extensions.ObjectPool to 7.0.5
• Persistence.Sql.Common: Add transaction isolation level to SQL queries

SQL Transaction Isolation Level Setting

In 1.5.3, we're introducing fine-grained control over transaction isolation level inside the Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common common library. This setting will be propagated to the rest of the SQL persistence plugin ecosystem and the Akka.Hosting package in their next release version.

Four new HOCON settings are introduced:

• akka.persistence.journal.{plugin-name}.read-isolation-level
• akka.persistence.journal.{plugin-name}.write-isolation-level
• akka.persistence.snapshot-store.{plugin-name}.read-isolation-level
• akka.persistence.snapshot-store.{plugin-name}.write-isolation-level

you can go to the official Microsoft documentation to read more about these isolation level settings.

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.3, click here.

1.5.2 April 5th 2023

There are some major behavioral changes introduced to Akka.Cluster and Akka.Persistence in Akka.NET v1.5.2 - to learn how these changes might affect your Akka.NET applications, please see our Akka.NET v1.5.2 Upgrade Advisories on the Akka.NET website.

• Akka.Remote: Remove secure cookie from configuration
• DData: Remove unused _pruningPerformed and _tombstonedNodes variables
• Akka.Persistence: Remove default object serializer in Sql.Common
• Akka.Cluster: Log send time in verbose heartbeat message
• Akka.Streams: Optimize ForEachAsync
• Akka: Implement alternative AtomicState leveraging WaitAsync
• Akka.Streams: Use correct capacity when creating DynamicQueue when FixedQueue is full
• Akka.Cluster: Enable keep majority split brain resolver as default

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.2, click here.

1.5.1 March 15th 2023

• Akka.Persistence: Improve memory allocation
• Akka.Persistence: Implement persistence query in InMemory journal
• Akka: Fix bugs reported by PVS-Studio static analysis
• Akka: Bump Google.Protobuf to 3.22.1
• Akka.Persistence.Sqlite: Bump Microsoft.Data.SQLite to 7.0.4
• Akka: Fix StackOverflow exception in NewtonSoftSerializer

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.1, click here.

1.5.0 March 2nd 2023

Version 1.5.0 is a major new release of Akka.NET that is now marked as stable and ready for production use.

You can read the full notes about what's changed in Akka.NET v1.5 here. We also encourage you to watch our video: "Akka NET v1.5 New Features and Upgrade Guide"

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.0 so far, click here.

1.5.0-beta5 February 28th 2023

Version 1.5.0-beta5 contains breaking API changes and new API changes for Akka.NET.

• Akka.Cluster: Remove JoinAsync and JoinSeedNodesAsync default timeout values
• Akka.Event: expose Args() on LogMessage

1.5.0-beta4 February 28th 2023

Version 1.5.0-beta4 contains breaking API changes and new API changes for Akka.NET.

• Akka.Persistence.TCK: remove IDisposable from Akka.Persistence.TCK - this hid methods from the TestKit base classes.
• Akka.Remote: Make transport adapter messages public - adds back public APIs from v1.4.
• Akka.TestKit: fix accidental breaking changes in v1.5.0-beta3

1.5.0-beta3 February 27th 2023

Version 1.5.0-beta3 contains breaking API changes and new API changes for Akka.NET.

• Removed a number of Obsolete APIs that were generally not used much.
• Akka.Actor: ActorSystem.Create throws PlatformNotSupportedException on net7.0-android
• Akka.Actor: Append message content to DeadLetter log messages
• Akka.Streams: Use ActorSystem for Materializer - massive memory improvements for applications that materialize a large number of streams.
• Akka.Persistence.Query.Sql: backpressure control for queries - full details on this here: https://petabridge.com/blog/largescale-cqrs-akkadotnet-v1.5/

1.5.0-beta2 February 20th 2023

Version 1.5.0-beta2 contains breaking API changes and new API changes for Akka.NET.

• Akka.Event: Add K to the DateTime format string to include TZ information
• Akka.TestKit: Reintroduce old code and mark them obsolete - fixes major regression in Akka.TestKit.Xunit2 where we removed IDipsoable before. This PR reintroduces it for backwards compat.
• Akka.Cluster.Sharding: clean its internal cache if region/proxy died
• Akka.Util: Harden Option<T> by disallowing null value
• Akka.Util: move DateTime / TimeSpan extension APIs out of Akka.Util and into Akka.Cluster.Metrics
• Akka.Util: Remove unsafe implicit conversion operators in AtomicBoolean and AtomicReference<T>
• Akka: Standardize on C# 11.0
• Akka.Persistence: improve AsyncWriteJournal and PersistentActor performance

1.5.0-beta1 February 20th 2023

Version 1.5.0-beta1 contains breaking API changes and new API changes for Akka.NET.

Breaking Changes: Logging

In #6408 the entire ILoggingAdapter interface was rewritten in order to improve extensibility and performance (logging is now 30-40% faster in all cases and allocates ~50% fewer objects for large format strings).

All of the changes made here are source compatible, but not binary compatible - meaning that users and package authors will need to do the following:

• Add using Akka.Event in all files that used the ILoggingAdapter and
• Recompile.

NOTE: you can use a global using Akka.Event directive to do this solution / project-wide if your project supports C# 10 and / or .NET 6.

In addition to improving the performance of the ILoggingAdapter system, we've also made it more extensible - for instance, you can now globally configure the ILogMessageFormatter via the following HOCON:

akka { 
    loglevel=INFO,
    loggers=["Akka.Logger.Serilog.SerilogLogger, Akka.Logger.Serilog"]
    logger-formatter="Akka.Logger.Serilog.SerilogLogMessageFormatter, Akka.Logger.Serilog"
}

That will allow users to use the SerilogLogMessageFormatter globally throughout their applications - no more annoying calls like this inside individual actors that want to use semantic logging:

private readonly ILoggingAdapter _logger = Context.GetLogger<SerilogLoggingAdapter>();

Breaking Changes: Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common

This is a breaking change that should effect almost no users, but we deleted some old, bad ideas from the API surface and it might require all Akka.Persistence.Sql* plugins to be recompiled.

For what it's worth, Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common's performance has been improved significantly and we'll continue working on that with some additional API changes this week.

Other Changes and Additions

• Akka.Actor: New API - IActorRef.WatchAsync - adds a new extension method to IActorRef which allows users to subscribe to actor lifecycle notifications outside of the ActorSystem.
• Akka.Actor: Suppress System.Object warning for serializer configuration changes

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.0 so far, click here.

1.5.0-alpha4 February 1st 2023

Version 1.5.0-alpha3 contains several bug fixes and new features to Akka.NET

• Akka.TestKit: Remove Akka.Tests.Shared.Internal dependency
• Akka.TestKit: Added ReceiveAsync feature to TestActorRef
• Akka.Stream: Fix IAsyncEnumerator.DisposeAsync bug
• Akka: Add Exception serialization support for built-in messages
• Akka: Add simple actor telemetry feature
• Akka.Streams: Move Channel stages from Alpakka to Akka.NET repo
• Akka: Set actor stash capacity to actor mailbox or dispatcher size
• Akka: Add ByteString support to copy to/from Memory and Span
• Akka: Add support for UnrestrictedStash
• Akka: Add API for UntypedActorWithStash
• Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common: Fix unhandled DbExceptions that are wrapped inside AggregateException
• Akka.Persistence.Sql: Fix persistence id publisher actor hung on failure messages
• Akka: Change default pool router supervisor strategy to Restart
• NuGet package upgrades:
  • Bump Microsoft.Data.SQLite from 6.0.10 to 7.0.2
  • Bump Google.Protobuf from 3.21.9 to 3.21.12
  • Bump Newtonsoft.Json from 9.0.1 to 13.0.1
  • Bump Microsoft.Extensions.ObjectPool from 6.0.10 to 7.0.2
  • Bump Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection from 6.0.1 to 7.0.0

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.5.0 so far, click here.

1.5.0-alpha3 November 15th 2022

Akka.NET v1.5.0-alpha3 is a security patch for Akka.NET v1.5.0-alpha2 but also includes some other fixes.

Security Advisory: Akka.NET v1.5.0-alpha2 and earlier depend on an old System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager version 4.7.0 which transitively depends on System.Common.Drawing v4.7.0. The System.Common.Drawing v4.7.0 is affected by a remote code execution vulnerability GHSA-ghhp-997w-qr28.

We have separately created a security advisory for Akka.NET Versions < 1.4.46 and < 1.5.0-alpha3 to track this issue.

Fixes and Updates

• Akka: Revert ConfigurationException due to binary incompatibility
• Akka: Upgrade to Newtonsoft.Json 13.0.1 as minimum version - resolves security issue.
• Akka: Upgrade to System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager 6.0.1 - resolves security issue.
• Akka: Upgrade to Google.Protobuf 3.21.9
• Akka.Cluster.Tools: Make sure that DeadLetters published by DistributedPubSubMediator contain full context of topic
• Akka.Streams: Remove suspicious code fragment in ActorMaterializer
• Akka.IO: Report cause for Akka/IO TCP CommandFailed events
• Akka.Cluster.Metrics: Improve CPU/Memory metrics collection at Akka.Cluster.Metrics - built-in metrics are now much more accurate.

You can see the full set of tracked issues for Akka.NET v1.5.0 here.

1.5.0-alpha2 October 17th 2022

Akka.NET v1.5.0-alpha2 is a maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.5 that contains numerous performance improvements in critical areas, including core actor message processing and Akka.Remote.

Performance Fixes

• remove delegate allocation from ForkJoinDispatcher and DedicatedThreadPool
• eliminate Mailbox delegate allocations
• Reduce FSM<TState, TData> allocations
• removed boxing allocations inside FSM.State.Equals
• Eliminate DefaultLogMessageFormatter allocations

In sum you should expect to see total memory consumption, garbage collection, and throughput improve when you upgrade to Akka.NET v1.5.0-alpha2.

Other Features and Improvements

• DData: Suppress gossip message from showing up in debug log unless verbose debug logging is turned on
• TestKit: TestKit automatically injects the default TestKit default configuration if an ActorSystem is passed into its constructor
• Sharding: Added a new GetEntityLocation query message to retrieve an entity address location in the shard region
• Sharding: Fixed GetEntityLocation uses wrong actor path
• Akka.Cluster and Akka.Cluster.Sharding: should throw human-friendly exception when accessing cluster / sharding plugins when clustering is not running
• Akka.Cluster.Sharding: Add HashCodeMessageExtractor factory
• Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common: Fix DbCommand.CommandTimeout in BatchingSqlJournal

1.5.0-alpha1 August 22 2022

Akka.NET v1.5.0-alpha1 is a major release that contains a lot of code improvement and rewrites/refactors. Major upgrades to Akka.Cluster.Sharding in particular.

Deprecation

Some codes and packages are being deprecated in v1.5

• Deprecated/removed Akka.DI package
  Please use the new Akka.DependencyInjection NuGet package as a replacement. Documentation can be read here
• Deprecated/removed Akka.MultiNodeTestRunner package
  Please use the new Akka.MultiNode.TestAdapter NuGet package as a replacement. Documentation can be read here.
• [Streams] Refactor SetHandler(Inlet, Outlet, IanAndOutGraphStageLogic) to SetHandlers()

Changes

Akka

• Add dual targetting to support .NET 6.0
  All Akka.NET packages are now dual targetting netstandard2.0 and net6.0 platforms, we will be integrating .NET 6.0 better performing API and SDK in the future.
• Add IThreadPoolWorkItem support to ThreadPoolDispatcher
• Add ValueTask support to PipeTo extensions
• Add CancellationToken support to Cancelable
• Fix long starting loggers crashing ActorSystem startup
  All loggers are asynchronously started during ActorSystem startup. A warning will be logged if a logger does not respond within the prescribed akka.logger-startup-timeout period and will be awaited upon in a detached task until the ActorSystem is shut down. This have a side effect in that slow starting loggers might not be able to capture all log events emmited by the EventBus until it is ready.

Akka.Cluster

• Fix ChannelTaskScheduler to work with Akka.Cluster, ported from 1.4
• Harden Cluster.JoinAsync() and Cluster.JoinSeedNodesAsync() methods
• Fix ShardedDaemonProcess should use lease, if configured
• Make SplitBrainResolver more tolerant to invalid node records
• Enable Heartbeat and HearbeatRsp message serialization and deserialization
  By default, Akka.Cluster will now use the new Heartbeat and HartbeatRsp message serialization/deserialization that was introduced in version 1.4.19. If you're doing a rolling upgrade from a version older than 1.4.19, you will need to set akka.cluster.use-legacy-heartbeat-message to true.

Akka.Cluster.Sharding

• Make Cluster.Sharding recovery more tolerant against corrupted persistence data
• Major reorganization to Akka.Cluster.Sharding

The Akka.Cluster.Sharding changes in Akka.NET v1.5 are significant, but backwards compatible with v1.4 and upgrades should happen seamlessly.

Akka.Cluster.Sharding's state-store-mode has been split into two parts:

• CoordinatorStore
• ShardStore

Which can use different persistent mode configured via akka.cluster.sharding.state-store-mode & akka.cluster.sharding.remember-entities-store.

Possible combinations:

There should be no breaking changes from user perspective. Only some internal messages/objects were moved.
There should be no change in the PersistentId behavior and default persistent configuration (akka.cluster.sharding.state-store-mode)

This change is designed to speed up the performance of Akka.Cluster.Sharding coordinator recovery by moving remember-entities recovery into separate actors - this also solves major performance problems with the ddata recovery mode overall.

The recommended settings for maximum ease-of-use for Akka.Cluster.Sharding going forward will be:

akka.cluster.sharding{
  state-store-mode = ddata
  remember-entities-store = eventsourced
}

However, for the sake of backwards compatibility the Akka.Cluster.Sharding defaults have been left as-is:

akka.cluster.sharding{
  state-store-mode = persistence
  # remember-entities-store (not set - also uses legacy Akka.Persistence)
}

Switching over to using remember-entities-store = eventsourced will cause an initial migration of data from the ShardCoordinator's journal into separate event journals going forward - this migration is irreversible without taking the cluster offline and deleting all Akka.Cluster.Sharding-related data from Akka.Persistence, so plan accordingly.

Akka.Cluster.Tools

• Add typed ClusterSingleton support
• Singleton can use Member.AppVersion metadata to decide its host node during hand-over
  Akka.Cluster.Singleton can use Member.AppVersion metadata when it is relocating the singleton instance. When turned on, new singleton instance will be created on the oldest node in the cluster with the highest AppVersion number. You can opt-in to this behavior by setting akka.cluster.singleton.consider-app-version to true.

Akka.Persistence.Query

• Add TimeBasedUuid offset property

Akka.Remote

• Fix typo in HOCON SSL settings. Backward compatible with the old setting names
• Treat all exceptions thrown inside EndpointReader message dispatch as transient, Ported from 1.4
• Fix SSL enable HOCON setting

Akka.Streams

• Allow GroupBy sub-flow to re-create closed sub-streams, backported to 1.4
• Fix ActorRef source not completing properly, backported to 1.4
• Rewrite ActorRefSink as a GraphStage
• Add stream cancellation cause upstream propagation, ported from 1.4
• Fix VirtualProcessor subscription bug, ported from 1.4
• Refactor Sink.Ignore signature from Task to Task<Done>
• Add SourceWithContext.FromTuples() operator`
• Add GroupedWeightedWithin operator
• Add IAsyncEnumerable source

Akka.TestKit

• Rewrite Akka.TestKit to work asynchronously from the ground up

1.4.37 April 14 2022

Akka.NET v1.4.37 is a minor release that contains some minor bug fixes.

• Persistence.Query: Change AllEvents query failure log severity from Debug to Error
• Coordination: Harden LeaseProvider instance Activator exception handling
• Akka: Make ActorSystemImpl.Abort skip the CoordinatedShutdown check

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.37, click here.

1.4.36 April 4 2022

Akka.NET v1.4.36 is a minor release that contains some bug fixes. Most of the changes have been aimed at improving our web documentation and code cleanup to modernize some of our code.

• Akka: Bump Hyperion to 0.12.2

Bug fixes:

• Akka: Fix CoordinatedShutdown memory leak
• Akka: Fix TcpConnection error handling and death pact de-registration

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.36, click here.

1.4.35 March 18 2022

Akka.NET v1.4.35 is a minor release that contains some bug fixes. Most of the changes have been aimed at improving our web documentation and code cleanup to modernize some of our code.

Bug fixes:

• Akka: Fixed IActorRef leak inside EventStream
• Akka: Fixed ActorSystemSetup.And forgetting registered types
• Akka.Persistence.Query.Sql: Fixed Query PersistenceIds query bug
• Akka.Streams: Add MapMaterializedValue for SourceWithContext and FlowWithContext

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.35, click here.

1.4.34 March 7 2022

Akka.NET v1.4.34 is a minor release that contains some bug fixes. Most of the changes have been aimed at improving our web documentation and code cleanup to modernize some of our code.

Bug fixes:

• Akka: Added support to pass a state object into CircuitBreaker to reduce allocations
• Akka.DistributedData: ORSet merge operation performance improvement
• Akka.Streams: FlowWithContext generic type parameters have been reordered to make them easier to read

Improvements:

• Akka: PipeTo can be configured to retain async threading context

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.34, click here.

1.4.33 February 14 2022

Akka.NET v1.4.33 is a minor release that contains some bug fixes. Most of the changes have been aimed at improving our web documentation and code cleanup to modernize some of our code. The most important bug fix is the actor Props memory leak when actors are cached inside Akka.Remote.

• Akka: Fix memory leak bug within actor Props
• Akka: Fix ChannelExecutor configuration backward compatibility bug
• Akka.TestKit: Fix ExpectAsync detached Task bug
• DistributedPubSub: Fix DeadLetter suppression for topics with no subscribers

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.33, click here.

1.4.32 January 19 2022

Akka.NET v1.4.32 is a minor release that contains some API improvements. Most of the changes have been aimed at improving our web documentation and code cleanup to modernize some of our code. One big improvement in this version release is the Hyperion serialization update.

Hyperion 0.12.0 introduces a new deserialization security mechanism to allow users to selectively filter allowed types during deserialization to prevent deserialization of untrusted data described here. This new feature is exposed in Akka.NET in HOCON through the new akka.actor.serialization-settings.hyperion.allowed-types settings or programmatically through the new WithTypeFilter method in the HyperionSerializerSetup class.

The simplest way to programmatically describe the type filter is to use the convenience class TypeFilterBuilder:

var typeFilter = TypeFilterBuilder.Create()
    .Include<AllowedClassA>()
    .Include<AllowedClassB>()
    .Build();
var setup = HyperionSerializerSetup.Default
    .WithTypeFilter(typeFilter);

You can also create your own implementation of ITypeFilter and pass an instance of it into the WithTypeFilter method.

For complete documentation, please read the Hyperion readme on filtering types for secure deserialization.

• Akka.Streams: Added Flow.LazyInitAsync and Sink.LazyInitSink to replace Sink.LazyInit
• Akka.Serialization.Hyperion: Implement the new ITypeFilter security feature

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.32, click here.

1.4.31 December 20 2021

Akka.NET v1.4.31 is a minor release that contains some bug fixes.

Akka.NET v1.4.30 contained a breaking change that broke binary compatibility with all Akka.DI plugins.
Even though those plugins are deprecated that change is not compatible with our SemVer standards
and needed to be reverted. We regret the error.

Bug fixes:

• Akka: Reverted Props code refactor

1.4.30 December 20 2021

Akka.NET v1.4.30 is a minor release that contains some enhancements for Akka.Streams and some bug fixes.

New features:

• Akka: Added StringBuilder pooling in NewtonsoftJsonSerializer
• Akka.TestKit: Added InverseFishForMessage
• Akka.Streams: Added custom frame sized Flow to Framing
• Akka.Streams: Allow Stream to be consumed as IAsyncEnumerable

Bug fixes:

• Akka.Cluster: Reverted startup sequence change

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.30, click here.

1.4.29 December 13 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4
Akka.NET v1.4.29 is a minor release that contains some enhancements for Akka.Streams and some bug fixes.

New features:

• Akka: Added a channel based task scheduler
• Akka.Discovery: Moved Akka.Discovery out of beta

Documentation:

• Akka: Added a serializer ID troubleshooting table
• Akka.Cluster.Sharding: Added a tutorial section

Bug fixes:

• Akka.Cluster: Changed Akka.Cluster startup sequence
• Akka.DistributedData: Fix LightningDB throws MDB_NOTFOUND when data directory already exist
• Akka.IO: Fix memory leak on UDP connector
• Akka.Persistence.Sql: Fix performance issue with highest sequence number query

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.29, click here.

1.4.28 November 10 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4
Akka.NET v1.4.28 is a minor release that contains some enhancements for Akka.Streams and some bug fixes.

New Akka.Streams Stages
Akka.NET v1.4.28 includes two new Akka.Streams stages:

• Source.Never - a utility stage that never emits any elements, never completes, and never fails. Designed primarily for unit testing.
• Flow.WireTap - the WireTap stage attaches a given Sink to a Flow without affecting any of the upstream or downstream elements. This stage is designed for performance monitoring and instrumentation of Akka.Streams graphs.

In addition to these, here are some other changes introduced Akka.NET v1.4.28:

• Akka.Streams: Source that flattens a Task source and keeps the materialized value
• Akka.Streams: made GraphStageLogic.LogSource virtual and change default StageLogic LogSource
• Akka.IO: UdpListener Responds IPv6 Bound message with IPv4 Bind message
• Akka.MultiNodeTestRunner: now runs on Linux and as a dotnet test package - we will keep you posted on this, as we're still working on getting Rider / VS Code / Visual Studio debugger-attached support to work correctly.
• Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common: Cancel DBCommand after finish reading events by PersistenceId - massive performance fix for Akka.Persistence with many log entries on SQL-based journals.
• Akka.Actor: DefaultResizer does not reisize when ReceiveAsync is used

If you want to see the full set of changes made in Akka.NET v1.4.28, click here.

Special thanks for @SeanKilleen for contributing extensive Markdown linting and automated CI checks for that to our documentation! #5312

1.4.27 October 11 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4
Akka.NET v1.4.27 is a small release that contains some major performance improvements for Akka.Remote.

Performance Fixes
In RemoteActorRefProvider address paring, caching and resolving improvements Akka.NET contributor @Zetanova introduced some major changes that make the entire ActorPath class much more reusable and more parse-efficient.

Our last major round of Akka.NET performance improvements in Akka.NET v1.4.25 produced the following:

OSVersion:                         Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0
ProcessorCount:                    16
ClockSpeed:                        0 MHZ
Actor Count:                       32
Messages sent/received per client: 200000  (2e5)
Is Server GC:                      True
Thread count:                      111

Num clients, Total [msg], Msgs/sec, Total [ms]
         1,  200000,    130634,    1531.54
         5, 1000000,    246975,    4049.20
        10, 2000000,    244499,    8180.16
        15, 3000000,    244978,   12246.39
        20, 4000000,    245159,   16316.37
        25, 5000000,    243333,   20548.09
        30, 6000000,    241644,   24830.55

In Akka.NET v1.4.27 those numbers now look like:

OSVersion:                         Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.
ProcessorCount:                    16                            
ClockSpeed:                        0 MHZ                         
Actor Count:                       32                            
Messages sent/received per client: 200000  (2e5)                 
Is Server GC:                      True                          
Thread count:                      111                           
                                                                 
Num clients, Total [msg], Msgs/sec, Total [ms]                   
         1,  200000,    105043,    1904.29                       
         5, 1000000,    255494,    3914.73                       
        10, 2000000,    291843,    6853.30                       
        15, 3000000,    291291,   10299.75                       
        20, 4000000,    286513,   13961.68                       
        25, 5000000,    292569,   17090.64                       
        30, 6000000,    281492,   21315.35

To put these numbers in comparison, here's what Akka.NET's performance looked like as of v1.4.0:

Num clients (actors)    Total [msg] Msgs/sec    Total [ms]
1   200000  69736   2868.60
5   1000000 141243  7080.98
10  2000000 136771  14623.27
15  3000000 38190   78556.49
20  4000000 32401   123454.60
25  5000000 33341   149967.08
30  6000000 126093  47584.92

We've made Akka.Remote consistently faster, more predictable, and reduced total memory consumption significantly in the process.

You can see the full set of changes introduced in Akka.NET v1.4.27 here

1.4.26 September 28 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4
Akka.NET v1.4.26 is a very small release that addresses one wire format regression introduced in Akka.NET v1.4.20.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Akka.Remote / Akka.Persistence: PrimitiveSerializers manifest backwards compatibility problem - this could cause regressions when upgrading to Akka.NET v1.4.20 and later. We have resolved this issue in Akka.NET v1.4.26. Please see our Akka.NET v1.4.26 upgrade advisory for details.
• Akka.DistributedData.LightningDb: Revert #5180, switching back to original LightningDB packages

You can see the full set of changes introduced in Akka.NET v1.4.26 here

1.4.25 September 08 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4
Akka.NET v1.4.25 includes some significant performance improvements for Akka.Remote and a number of important bug fixes and improvements.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Akka.IO.Tcp: connecting to an unreachable DnsEndpoint never times out
• Akka.Actor: need to enforce stdout-loglevel = off all the way through ActorSystem lifecycle
• Akka.Actor: Ask should push unhandled answers into deadletter
• Akka.Routing: Make Router.Route` virtual
• Akka.Actor: Improve performance on IActorRef.Child API - signficantly improves performance of many Akka.NET functions, but includes a public API change on IActorRef that is source compatible but not necessarily binary-compatible. IActorRef GetChild(System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<string> name) is now IActorRef GetChild(System.Collections.Generic.IReadOnlyList<string> name). This API is almost never called directly by user code (it's almost always called via the internals of the ActorSystem when resolving ActorSelections or remote messages) so this change should be safe.
• Akka.Actor: IsNobody throws NRE
• Akka.Cluster.Tools: singleton fix cleanup of overdue _removed members
• Akka.DistributedData: ddata exclude Exiting members in Read/Write MajorityPlus

Performance Improvements
Using our standard RemotePingPong benchmark, the difference between v1.4.24 and v1.4.24 is significant:

v1.4.24

OSVersion:                         Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0 
ProcessorCount:                    16                              
ClockSpeed:                        0 MHZ                           
Actor Count:                       32                              
Messages sent/received per client: 200000  (2e5)                   
Is Server GC:                      True                            
Thread count:                      111                             
                                                                   
Num clients, Total [msg], Msgs/sec, Total [ms]                     
         1,  200000,     96994,    2062.08                         
         5, 1000000,    194818,    5133.93                         
        10, 2000000,    198966,   10052.93                         
        15, 3000000,    199455,   15041.56                         
        20, 4000000,    198177,   20184.53                         
        25, 5000000,    197613,   25302.80                         
        30, 6000000,    197349,   30403.82                         

v1.4.25

OSVersion:                         Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0
ProcessorCount:                    16
ClockSpeed:                        0 MHZ
Actor Count:                       32
Messages sent/received per client: 200000  (2e5)
Is Server GC:                      True
Thread count:                      111

Num clients, Total [msg], Msgs/sec, Total [ms]
         1,  200000,    130634,    1531.54
         5, 1000000,    246975,    4049.20
        10, 2000000,    244499,    8180.16
        15, 3000000,    244978,   12246.39
        20, 4000000,    245159,   16316.37
        25, 5000000,    243333,   20548.09
        30, 6000000,    241644,   24830.55

This represents a 24% overall throughput improvement in Akka.Remote across the board. We have additional PRs staged that should get aggregate performance improvements above 40% for Akka.Remote over v1.4.24 but they didn't make it into the Akka.NET v1.4.25 release.

You can see the full set of changes introduced in Akka.NET v1.4.25 here

1.4.24 August 17 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Akka: Make Router open to extensions
• Akka: Allow null response to Ask<T>
• Akka.Cluster: Fix cluster startup race condition
• Akka.Streams: Fix RestartFlow bug
• Akka.Persistence.Sql: Implement TimestampProvider in BatchingSqlJournal
• Akka.Serialization.Hyperion: Bump Hyperion version from 0.11.0 to 0.11.1
• Akka.Serialization.Hyperion: Add Hyperion unsafe type filtering security feature

You can see the full set of changes introduced in Akka.NET v1.4.24 here

1.4.23 August 09 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4

Akka.NET v1.4.23 is designed to patch an issue that occurs on Linux machines using Akka.Cluster.Sharding with akka.cluster.sharding.state-store-mode=ddata and akka.cluster.sharding.remember-entities=on: "System.DllNotFoundException: Unable to load shared library 'lmdb' or one of its dependencies"

In Akka.NET v1.4.21 we added built-in support for Akka.DistributedData.LightningDb for use with the remember-entities setting, but we never received any reports about this issue until shortly after v1.4.22 was released. Fundamentally, the problem was that our downstream dependency, Lightning.NET, doesn't include any of the necessary Linux native binaries in their distributions currently. So in the meantime, we've published our own "vendored" distribution of Lightning.NET to NuGet until a new official one is released that includes these binaries.

There are some other small fixes included in Akka.NET v1.4.23 and you can read about them here.

1.4.22 August 05 2021

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.4

Akka.NET v1.4.22 is a fairly large release that includes an assortment of performance and bug fixes.

Performance Fixes
Akka.NET v1.4.22 includes a significant performance improvement for Ask<T>, which now requires 1 internal await operation instead of 3:

Before

After

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Akka: Use ranged nuget versioning for Newtonsoft.Json
• Akka: Pipe of Canceled Tasks
• Akka: CircuitBreaker's Open state should return a faulted Task instead of throwing
• Akka.Remote: Can DotNetty socket exception include information about the address?
• Akka.Remote: log full exception upon deserialization failure
• Akka.Cluster: SBR fix & update
• Akka.Streams: Restart Source|Flow|Sink: Configurable stream restart deadline
• Akka.DistributedData: ddata replicator stops but doesn't look like it can be restarted easily
• Akka.DistributedData: ddata ReadMajorityPlus and WriteMajorityPlus
• Akka.DistributedData: DData Max-Delta-Elements may not be fully honoured

You can see the full set of changes introduced in Akka.NET v1.4.22 here

Akka.Cluster.Sharding.RepairTool
In addition to the work done on Akka.NET itself, we've also created a separate tool for cleaning up any left-over data in the event of an Akka.Cluster.Sharding cluster running with akka.cluster.sharding.state-store-mode=persistence was terminated abruptly before it had a chance to cleanup.

We've added documentation to the Akka.NET website that explains how to use this tool here: https://getakka.net/articles/clustering/cluster-sharding.html#cleaning-up-akkapersistence-shard-state

And the tool itself has documentation here: https://github.com/petabridge/Akka.Cluster.Sharding.RepairTool

Changes:

• b6d1ce3 added v1.5.8 release notes (#6795)
• 5fa8ef4 Added Source/Flow Setup operator (#6788)
• 74c59c5 Bump Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk from 17.6.0 to 17.6.2 (#6785)
• 6de2171 Bump Verify.Xunit from 20.3.0 to 20.3.2 (#6786)
• 4e23091 Bump Microsoft.Data.SQLite from 7.0.5 to 7.0.7 (#6791)
• 2b9c059 Bump NUnit3TestAdapter from 4.4.2 to 4.5.0 (#6779)
• 2873951 docs: fix wrong link syntax in docs/articles/configuration/config.md (#6782)
• e014825 remove some state machine (#6787)
• c3e03a8 Bump Google.Protobuf from 3.23.1 to 3.23.2 (#6777)
• 0efdc87 Bump Verify.Xunit from 20.1.1 to 20.3.0 (#6776)