I've seen people do this a lot. You have to tell Akka/actors which executorService to use. Actors are just a messaging/mailbox abstraction over threads/pools in

I've seen people do this a lot. You have to tell Akka/actors which executorService to use. Actors are just a messaging/mailbox abstraction over threads/pools inspired by Erlang. Akka should use a work-stealing service by default, depending on the version, which might explain why non-blocking calculations used only two threads.