title: Does it make sense to use a pool of Actors?
body: <p>I'm just learning, and really liking, the Actor pattern. I'm using Scala right now, but I'm interested in the architectural style in general, as it's used in Scala, Erlang, Groovy, etc.</p>
  
  <p>The case I'm thinking of is where I need to do things concurrently, such as, let's say "run a job". </p>
  
  <p>With threading, I would create a thread pool and a blocking queue, and have each thread poll the blocking queue, and process jobs as they came in and out of the queue.</p>
  
  <p>With actors, what's the best way to handle this? Does it make sense to create a pool of actors, and somehow send messages to them containing or the jobs? Maybe with a "coordinator" actor?</p>
  
  <p><em><strong>Note</strong></em>: An aspect of the case which I forgot to mention was: what if I want to constrain the number of jobs my app will process concurrently? Maybe with a config setting? I was thinking that a pool might make it easy to do this.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>