Question

I am currently trying to get started with Akka and I am facing a weird problem. I’ve got the following code for my Actor:

class AkkaWorkerFT extends Actor {
  def receive = {
    case Work(n, c) if n < 0 => throw new Exception("Negative number")
    case Work(n, c) => self reply n.isProbablePrime(c);
  }
}

And this is how I start my workers:

val workers = Vector.fill(nrOfWorkers)(actorOf[AkkaWorkerFT].start());
val router = Routing.loadBalancerActor(SmallestMailboxFirstIterator(workers)).start()

And this is how I shut everything down:

futures.foreach( _.await )
router ! Broadcast(PoisonPill)
router ! PoisonPill

Now what happens is if I send the workers messages with n > 0 (no exception is thrown), everything works fine and the application shuts down properly. However, as soon as I send it a single message which results in an exception, the application does not terminate because there is still an actor running, but I can’t figure out where it comes from.

In case it helps, this is the stack of the thread in question:

  Thread [akka:event-driven:dispatcher:event:handler-6] (Suspended) 
    Unsafe.park(boolean, long) line: not available [native method]  
    LockSupport.park(Object) line: 158  
    AbstractQueuedSynchronizer$ConditionObject.await() line: 1987   
    LinkedBlockingQueue<E>.take() line: 399 
    ThreadPoolExecutor.getTask() line: 947  
    ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run() line: 907   
    MonitorableThread(Thread).run() line: 680   
    MonitorableThread.run() line: 182   

PS: The thread which is not terminating isn’t any of the worker threads, because I’ve added a postStop callback, every one of them stops properly.

PPS: Actors.registry.shutdownAll workarounds the problem, but I think shutdownAll should only be used as a last resort, shouldn’t it?

Answer 1

The proper way to handle problems inside akka actors is not to throw an exception but rather to set supervisor hierarchies

“Throwing an exception in concurrent code (let’s assume we are using
non-linked actors), will just simply blow up the thread that currently
executes the actor.

There is no way to find out that things went wrong (apart from
inspecting the stack trace).
There is nothing you can do about it.”

see Fault Tolerance Through Supervisor Hierarchies (1.2)

* note * the above is true for old versions of Akka (1.2)
In newer versions (e.g. 2.2) you’d still set a supervisor hierarchy but it will trap Exceptions thrown by child processes. e.g.

class Child extends Actor {
    var state = 0
    def receive = {
      case ex: Exception ⇒ throw ex
      case x: Int        ⇒ state = x
      case "get"         ⇒ sender ! state
    }
  }

and in the supervisor:

class Supervisor extends Actor {
    import akka.actor.OneForOneStrategy
    import akka.actor.SupervisorStrategy._
    import scala.concurrent.duration._

    override val supervisorStrategy =
      OneForOneStrategy(maxNrOfRetries = 10, withinTimeRange = 1 minute) {
        case _: ArithmeticException      ⇒ Resume
        case _: NullPointerException     ⇒ Restart
        case _: IllegalArgumentException ⇒ Stop
        case _: Exception                ⇒ Escalate
      }

    def receive = {
      case p: Props ⇒ sender ! context.actorOf(p)
    }
  }

see Fault Tolerance Through Supervisor Hierarchies (2.2)