Actors activation performance

For applications using actors in Dapr there are two aspects to be considered. First, is the routing of actor invocations handled by Dapr sidecar. Second, is the actors runtime that is implemented and handled on the application side and depends on the SDK. For now, the performance tests are using the Java SDK to provide an actors runtime in the application.

• Sidecar (data plane)
• Placement (required for actors, control plane mapping actor types to hosts)
• Sidecar Injector (control plane)
• Sentry (optional, control plane)

This test uses invokes actors via Dapr’s HTTP API directly.

The test was conducted on a 3 node Kubernetes cluster, using commodity hardware running 4 cores and 8GB of RAM, without any network acceleration. The setup included a load tester (Fortio) pod with a Dapr sidecar injected into it that called the service invocation API to reach a pod on a different node.

• 500 requests per second
• 1 replica
• 1 minute duration
• Sidecar limited to 0.5 vCPU
• mTLS enabled
• Sidecar telemetry enabled (tracing with a sampling rate of 0.1)

• The actual throughput was ~500 qps.
• The tp90 latency was ~3ms.
• The tp99 latency was ~6.2ms.
• Dapr app consumed ~523m CPU and ~304.7Mb of Memory
• Dapr sidecar consumed 2m CPU and ~18.2Mb of Memory
• No app restarts
• No sidecar restarts

• For more information see