Grain Lifecycle
Grains are logical entities that always exist, virtually, and have stable logical identities (keys). Application code never creates or destroys grains. Instead, it acts as if all possible grains are always in memory and available for processing requests.
注：
- Grain是一直存在的逻辑实体，有稳定的逻辑标识(键)。应用程序代码永远不会创建或销毁Grain。相反，它的作用就好像所有可能的谷物都在内存中，对于处理请求，一直处于可用状态。
- 永远假设Grain是活着的。
Grains get physically instantiated, activated, by the Orleans runtime automatically on an as-needed to process incoming requests. After a grain has been idle for a certain amount of time, the Orleans runtime automatically removes, deactivates, it from memory.
注：
- 当需要处理请求时，Orleans运行时会将Grain自动activate。
- 当Grain被闲置一段时间时，Orleans运行时会将Grain自动remove、deactivate。
A physical instance of a grain in memory is called a grain activation. Grain activations are invisible to application code as well as the process of activating and deactivating them. Only the grain itself can be aware of that - by overriding virtual methods OnActivateAsync and OnDeactivateAsync that get invoked upon activation and deactivation of the grain respectively.
注：
- 在内存中实例化Grain叫作Grain激活。
- 对应用程序而言，activate与deactivate是透明的。
- activate：override OnActivateAsync虚方法；deactivate: override OnDeactivateAsync 虚方法
Over the course of its eternal, virtual, life a grain goes through the cycles of activations and deactivations, staying always available for callers to invoke it, whether it is in memory at the time of the call or not.
注：
- 无论Grain在不在内存里，Grain对于调用者总是可用的。
When you get a grain reference in a client or in another grain by using GetGrain, you only get a proxy object, called a grain reference, with a logical address (identity) of the grain, but not its physical address. When you call a method using the grain reference, then the grain will get activated in a silo (if it is not already activated in the cluster). Your method calls on the grain reference are sent to the activation by the Orleans runtime.
注：
- 客户端使用Grain引用时，使用的是它的引用代理类，不是物理地址。
- Grain实例在云端的Silo里。
- 使用Grain引用时，如果Grain不存在，Orleans运行时会激活它。
A call to GetGrain is an inexpensive local operation of constructing a grain reference with an embedded identity of the target grain.
Virtual methods
A grain class can optionally override OnActivateAsync and OnDeactivateAsync virtual methods that get invoked by the Orleans runtime upon activation and deactivation of each grain of the class. This gives the grain code a chance to perform additional initialization and cleanup operations. An exception throw by OnActivateAsync fails the activation process. While OnActivateAsync, if overridden, is always called as part of the grain activation process, OnDeactivateAsync is not guaranteed to get called in all situations, for example, in case of a server failure or other abnormal events. Because of that, applications should not rely on OnDeactivateAsync for performing critical operations, such as persistence of state changes, and only use it for best effort operations.
注：
- 重写OnActivateAsync 自定义initialization操作
- 重写OnDeactivateAsync 自定义cleanup操作
- OnActivateAsync中报异常，将阻断实例化过程。
- 不建议重写OnDeactivateAsync。
Declarative persistence
If a grain class uses declarative persistence by inheriting from Grain, the Orleans runtime automatically loads state of grain of that class as part of the activation process by calling ReadStateAsync before invoking OnActivateAsync and processing a request to the grain. A failure to load grain’s state with ReadStateAsync fails the activation process. The Orleans runtime never automatically persists grain’s state, and leaves it up to the application code when to call WriteStateAsync’
Sequence of events in a grain’s life cycle
- 如果Grain继承了Grain，Orleans运行时会在执行OnActivateAsync之前，执行ReadStateAsync，自动加载state。
- 如果加载state失败，则激活过程失败。
- Orleans运行时从不会自动持久化grain的state。
The life cycle of a grain is like this
Another grain or a client calls a method of the grain
The grain gets activated (if it is not activated anywhere in the silo) and an instance of the grain class is created
Constructor of the grain is executed and DI will setup (If you have DI)
If declarative persistence is used, the grain state is read from storage
If overridden, OnActivateAsync is called
The grain processes incoming requests
The grain remains idle for some time
Runtime decides to deactivate the grain
Runtime calls OnDeactivateAsync
Runtime removes the grain from memory
Upon a graceful shutdown of a silo, all grain activations it holds get deactivated. Any requests waiting to be processed in grains’ queues get forwarded to other silos in the cluster, where new activations of deactivated grains get created on an as-needed basis. If a silo shuts down or dies ungracefully, other silos in the cluster detect the failure, and start creating new activations of grains lost on the failed silo, as new requests for those grains arrive. Note that detection of a silo failure takes some time (configurable), and hence the process of reactivating lost grains isn’t instantaneous
注：
- silo正常关闭，所有激活的grain将失活；等待处理的请求将由云中的其他silo处理，在silo里根据需求激活grain。
- silo非正常关闭，请求到达时，其他silo会检测到失败，会在失败的silo上创建grain；因为检测到silo故障需要一定的时间（可配置），丢失的grain不会被立即重新激活。