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Asked: 2026-05-27T13:03:25+00:00

I’ve some sporadic test failures and struggle to figure out why. I have a

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I’ve some sporadic test failures and struggle to figure out why. I have a bunch of actors which to the work which I want to test. At the beginning of the test I pass in an actor reference which I get from a TestProbe(). Later on the group of actors do some work and send the result to the given test probe actor reference. Then I check the result with the TestProbe(): 

class MyCaseSpec extends Spec with ShouldMatchers{
    describe("The Thingy"){
        it("should work"){
            val eventListener = TestProbe()

            val myStuffUnderTest = Actor.actorOf(new ComplexActor(eventListener.ref)).start();
            myStuffUnderTest ! "Start"

            val eventMessage = eventListener.receiveOne(10.seconds).asInstanceOf[SomeEventMessage]
            eventMessage.data should be ("Result")
        }

    }
}

Now once in a while the test fails. And when I look through the stack trace I see that I got a ‘ActorInitializationException’ when sending a message to the test probe actor. However at no point in time I stop the TestProbe actor.

Here’s the exception:

[akka:event-driven:dispatcher:global-11] [LocalActorRef] Actor has not been started, you need to invoke 'actor.start()' before using it
akka.actor.ActorInitializationException: Actor has not been started, you need to invoke 'actor.start()' before using it
[Gamlor-Laptop_c15fdca0-219e-11e1-9579-001b7744104e]
at akka.actor.ScalaActorRef$class.$bang(ActorRef.scala:1399)
at akka.actor.LocalActorRef.$bang(ActorRef.scala:605)
at akka.mobile.client.RemoteMessaging$RemoteMessagingSupervision$$anonfun$receive$1.apply(RemoteMessaging.scala:125)
at akka.mobile.client.RemoteMessaging$RemoteMessagingSupervision$$anonfun$receive$1.apply(RemoteMessaging.scala:121)
at akka.actor.Actor$class.apply(Actor.scala:545)
....

I’m wondering if I’m missing something obvious or am I making a subtle mistake? Or maybe something is really going wrong inside my code and I can’t see it?

I’m on Akka 1.2.

Update for Vitors-Comment. At line 125 I send a message to an actor with the !-operator. Now in the test-setup thats the TestProbe actor-reference. And I can’t figure out why sometimes the TestProbe actor seems to be stopped.

   protected def receive = {
      case msg: MaximumNumberOfRestartsWithinTimeRangeReached => {
        val lastException = msg.getLastExceptionCausingRestart
        faultHandling ! ConnectionError(lastException, messages.toList, self) // < Line 125. The faultHandling is the TestProbe actor
        become({
            // Change to failure-state behavior
          }
    // Snip

Anyway, I’m trying to isolate the problem further for the time being. Thanks for any hint / idea.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ok, almost certainly found the issue =). TestProbes do have a timeout: When nothing happens after 5 seconds, they stop them self.

    Now unfortunately the test takes just a little longer than 5 seconds: In that time the test-probe may stop itself all ready, which then causes the test to fail.

    Fixing it is easy, increase the timeout on the TestProbe:

      val errorHandler = ignoreConnectionMsgProbe()
  errorHandler.setTestActorTimeout(20.seconds)
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