ActorCore supports three topologies that define how actors are distributed and scale.

Each platform configures a default topology appropriate for that environment. In most cases, you can rely on these defaults unless you have specific distribution needs.

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Configuration

const config = {
  topology: "standalone" // or "partition" or "coordinate"
};

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Types of Topologies

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Standalone

  • How it works: Runs all actors in a single process
  • When to use: Development, testing, simple apps with low traffic
  • Limitations: No horizontal scaling, single point of failure
  • Default on: Node.js, Bun

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Partition

  • How it works: Each actor has its own isolated process. Clients connect directly to the actor for optimal performance.
  • When to use: Production environments needing horizontal scaling
  • Limitations: Minimal - balanced performance and availability for most use cases
  • Default on: Rivet, Cloudflare Workers

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Coordinate

  • How it works: Creates a peer-to-peer network between multiple servers with leader election with multiple actors running on each server. Clients connect to any server and data is transmitted to the leader over a pubsub server.
  • When to use: High-availability scenarios needing redundancy and failover
  • Limitations: Added complexity, performance overhead, requires external data source
  • Default on: None

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Choosing a Topology

In most cases, use your platform’s default:

  1. Standalone: Simple, great for development
  2. Partition: Best scaling & cost for production
  3. Coordinate: Good for specialized deployment scenarios