AIUI actors are regularly idle. However, you are right that Pony offers a clever mechanism not offered by Erlang, which allows an actor to effectively despawn itself. I believe how it does this is to notice when no other actor has a reference to it. If no other actor has a reference to it, no one cannot send it any messages. If it has no messages in its queue and it is idle (not currently dispatched on a message), we know it will never again receive any messages, and therefore it is safe to free itself because it will never again have work to do.