Automatic grain deactivation (how/when)

[swegele]

I've not yet been able to find any discussion as to when a grain gets deactivated (because it has been dormant for awhile). It is my impression from all the videos I watched about .NET Orleans that the system automatically deactivates dormant grains. Is there any documentation around how/when that happens.

For instance, I have a grain that represents a connected phone interview with 2 callers. Calls to it's grain methods normally happen every couple minutes. But there MIGHT be a long answer in the interview where there is no grain method called for say like 10-15 minutes. So I'm wondering if I would need to do something (like a heartbeat of some kind) to keep the grain aware that it is still alive/active.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm just looking for any info/documentation for how the silo/system decides to automatically deactivate a grain. I don't remember seeing any specifics about that functionality / logic. Like is it hours or minutes or days? Does that time value change based on memory scarcity / pressure?

[MickaelThumerel]

"deactivateonidle" => Ask explicitly to deactivate the grain as soon as flag as idle (Also Usefull in dev phase to tester state saving and recovery)

keepaliveattribute => Flag the grain to be keep alive untils the cluster close

Activation Info => All the information about grain activation/desactivation

[swegele]

@MickaelThumerel I totally missed that third item "Activation Info" in the docs. That exactly answered every question I had!

Salient points from the doc:

However, activation collection only takes into consideration how long a particular grain activation has been idle. Memory usage isn't used as a factor.

This time after which an idle grain activation becomes subject to collection is called Collection Age Limit. The default Collection Age Limit is 15 minutes, but it can be changed

Thanks so much for that!!