Imported From: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-4942?orig=1
Reporter: @oxbowlakes
Affected Versions: 2.9.0-1

@magarciaEPFL said:

@oxbowlakes, could you please confirm whether the problem is still in trunk?

@oxbowlakes said:
I can't comment I'm afraid Miguel. The problem is a rare one which occurs in a production application roughly once every few weeks to a month. I simply can't (for obvious reasons) replace the production application with one built against trunk.

If you think that this might be fixed but you aren't sure, I will be upgrading to 2.10 shortly after it comes out, so we should get a handle reasonably quickly on whether the issue still persists.

TBH, it seems likely that I need to set some kind of system-wide timeout on connect/read attempts via a JVM property - possibly like those defined here (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/guide/net/properties.html)

@vjovanov said:
This issue has not been fixed in trunk since Actors are being deprecated in the standard library and will be replaced with Akka Actors. Also actors will be removed from the scala-library.jar into scala-actors.jar. The actors package will continue to live in a separate repository but will not be maintained by the Scala Team.

We were not planning to fix bugs in actors any more but if it crashes your production environment we can find a solution. I see following options:

• migrate your system to Akka actors. We are providing the Actor Migration Kit which will enable smooth migration. I would recommend this step since Akka has superior performance and is rapidly developed and maintained
• fix the bug in trunk and submit a pull request to the master branch. In the request you can specify vjovanov or phaller as the reviewer.

@magarciaEPFL said:
@vjovanov, that means we will leave a note about the maintenance policy (see [#comment-57282]) for Scala Actors bugs, before closing them with WONTFIX (not a criticism, just looking for consensus on how to move forward).

@oxbowlakes said:
My playing around with system properties has been unsuccessful and the issue persists. Could you at least add a scala-actors system property and modify the code in TcpService.scala (line 179) to call setSoTimeout if the property is set. The property could be called scala.actors.tcpSocket.soTimeout. I'd recommend adding options for the others as well

@oxbowlakes said:
By the way - is there a version of the actor migration kit available? I really question how easy this will be with mature, complex systems. The akka failure model is quite different from the scala one. As a project, it's difficult to justify. I'd rather fork and fix the issues with scala actors

@vjovanov said:
Yes, there is. It will been merged into trunk soon (scala/scala#575). The kit is contained in the scala-actors-migration.jar however the guide document is not complete yet. It will be published once Akka merges code corresponding to the Migration Kit into their repository.

To get the flavor of migration before the official guide is released you can take a look at the test cases with "test/files/jvm/actmig-" prefix. They show some of the most common patterns with actors. If you have additional questions you can contact me directly. Also any input on the migration kit is highly appreciated.

@SethTisue said:
Scala actors are deprecated and unmaintained