Terse

Developers building multiplayer or agentic applications need a way to give each agent or user session durable, isolated state without overloading a central database or websocket server. Today the main option for this pattern is Cloudflare's Durable Objects, which the text says comes with extreme lock-in because it pulls developers into Cloudflare's D1, R2 and Workers stack. It also was not originally designed for agentic workloads, having been released five years ago before this use case existed. Teams coordinating multiple agents around shared data, such as a CRM, also need to avoid race conditions when several agents run concurrently.

Terse created Durable Actors, a fully open source (MIT licensed) infrastructure primitive modeled on Durable Objects: a small server that handles one request at a time, has its own SQLite database, and is addressable by name, with exactly one instance existing in the world. Each agent can run on its own Durable Actor, with users connecting via websocket, allowing horizontal scaling without a central bottleneck. Because each Actor processes one request at a time, it can also protect shared resources like a CRM from data races when multiple agents operate concurrently. The project ships with a helm chart for self-hosting and the site publishes latency benchmarks (for example, 1.51ms p50 for stateful reads) along with a public counter demo.

The page frames Durable Objects as built five years ago, before agentic workloads existed, positioning Durable Actors as a version of the same primitive purpose-built for concurrent agent use cases.