Akka: Blocking implications in supervisor-child hierarchy

Question

I have a supervisor Actor which delegates work to a lower level child Actor using the tell command. The child Actor does some web service logic and when completes sends a response back to the supervisor. Can someone tell me what happens during this interaction in terms of access to the parents onReceive method?

For example when the parent calls tell can it then take another message from its mailbox and start processing that or does it need to wait until the child completes and sends response?

Answer 1

All actors are independent from each other: when the parent tells the child to do something, then the child will pick that up asynchronously without the parent having to wait for that to happen. The parent will then go on to react to new messages which come in. You are welcome to take a look at General Section of the Akka documentation for more details.