Energy Efficiency in Actor Systems: A Comparative Study of Akka and Elixir

Abstract

The energy consumption of digital infrastructures and applications constitutes a critical global concern. To build a sustainable digital future, software engineering must prioritize energy efficiency alongside traditional performance metrics. Actors provide an attractive model for distributed large-scale applications; however, the energy consumption of actor systems has barely been explored. This paper presents a comparative energy benchmarking study of two prominent actor-based frameworks: Akka, running on the Java Virtual Machine, and Elixir, running on the Erlang Virtual Machine. Utilizing high-resolution physical wattmeters on the Grid’5000 Cloud infrastructure, we evaluate these frameworks across single-node and multi-node distributed configurations. We used three benchmarks from the Savina benchmark suite to investigate the energy costs of actor spawning, message passing, and numeric computation. We demonstrate that Elixir is significantly more energy-efficient for actor-managing, i.e., orchestration-heavy tasks, consuming more than 8x less energy for actor spawning and for message passing compared to Akka. Akka, in contrast, demonstrates superior energy efficiency for CPU-intensive numeric workloads.