Can you describe a time when you faced a performance bottleneck in an Akka Streams application? How did you identify and resolve the issue?
In a previous Akka Streams application, I faced a performance bottleneck during data processing. The issue was slow downstream components causing backpressure on the entire stream.
I identified the problem using built-in monitoring tools like Kamon and visualizing metrics in Grafana. Metrics showed high latency and low throughput in specific stages of the stream.
To resolve the issue, I applied several optimizations :
1. Increased parallelism by adding more async boundaries.
2. Tuned buffer sizes to balance memory usage and throughput.
3. Optimized slow components with better algorithms or caching.
4. Introduced batching to reduce overhead per element.
5. Utilized Akka’s supervision strategies for error handling without stopping the stream.
After these changes, the application’s performance improved significantly, resolving the bottleneck.
