Hi All,
I noticed a change in the behavior when an exception thrown during pre-start after upgrading to Akka 2.6.20 from Akka 2.6.2. In Akka 2.6.2, when a child actor is being created and an unhandled exception is thrown during pre-start, my application keeps running into ActorInitializationException and tries to recreate the actor every time. The exception is handled by my supervision strategy and does not cause the parent actor or the application to stop. However, in Akka 2.6.20, once ActorInitializationException occurs, Akka runs into an assertion error in fault handling. This assertion error is then escalated to the parent actors and stops the application with the message “guardian failed, shutting down system”.
I suspect this behavior change is due to #27614. The assertion assert(perpetrator == self) fails because the perpetrator (FaultHandling.scala#L65) is null, indicating that _failed is something other than FailedRef. In my case _failed is FailedFatally when the assertion fails.
A NonFatal exception (ActorCell.scala#L653) causes _failed to be set to FailedFatally. Unfortunately, _failed always remains FailedFatally because transitions from FailedFatally to any other state is not allowed(FaultHandling.scala#L70). As a result, handleInvokeFailure(FaultHandling.scala#L211) can’t set _failed to the self actor ref like it previously could. Thus, my application now runs into the assertion error and eventually stops once the assertion error propagates to the parent actors.
I am trying to understand if this was added as a feature. If it’s a feature, how should the parent actor be handling the assertion error?
Thank you
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