Fault Tolerance

Each actor is the supervisor of its children, and as such each actor defines fault handling supervisor strategy. This strategy cannot be changed afterwards as it is an integral part of the actor system’s structure.

Fault Handling in Practice

First, let us look at a sample that illustrates one way to handle data store errors, which is a typical source of failure in real world applications. Of course it depends on the actual application what is possible to do when the data store is unavailable, but in this sample we use a best effort re-connect approach.

Read the following source code. The inlined comments explain the different pieces of the fault handling and why they are added. It is also highly recommended to run this sample as it is easy to follow the log output to understand what is happening in runtime.

!!!TODO: Port sample code

Creating a Supervisor Strategy

The following sections explain the fault handling mechanism and alternatives in more depth.

For the sake of demonstration let us consider the following strategy:

!!!TODO: Port sample code

We have chosen a few well-known exception types in order to demonstrate the application of the fault handling directives described in Supervision. First off, it is a one-for-one strategy, meaning that each child is treated separately (an all-for-one strategy works very similarly, the only difference is that any decision is applied to all children of the supervisor, not only the failing one). There are limits set on the restart frequency, namely maximum 10 restarts per minute; each of these settings could be left out, which means that the respective limit does not apply, leaving the possibility to specify an absolute upper limit on the restarts or to make the restarts work infinitely. The child actor is stopped if the limit is exceeded.

This is the piece which maps child failure types to their corresponding directives.

Default Supervisor Strategy

Escalate is used if the defined strategy doesn’t cover the exception that was thrown.

When the supervisor strategy is not defined for an actor the following exceptions are handled by default:

• ActorInitializationException will stop the failing child actor
• ActorKilledException will stop the failing child actor
• Exception will restart the failing child actor
• Other types of Exception will be escalated to parent actor

If the exception escalate all the way up to the root guardian it will handle it in the same way as the default strategy defined above.

You can combine your own strategy with the default strategy:

Logging of Actor Failures

By default the SupervisorStrategy logs failures unless they are escalated. Escalated failures are supposed to be handled, and potentially logged, at a level higher in the hierarchy.

You can mute the default logging of a SupervisorStrategy by setting loggingEnabled to false when instantiating it. Customized logging can be done inside the Decider. Note that the reference to the currently failed child is available as the Sender when the SupervisorStrategy is declared inside the supervising actor.

You may also customize the logging in your own SupervisorStrategy implementation by overriding the logFailure method.

Supervision of Top-Level Actors

Top-level actors means those which are created using actor.Spawn(), and they are children of the Root Guardian. There are no special rules applied in this case, the guardian simply applies the configured strategy.

The supervisor itself is supervised by the top-level actor provided by the ActorSystem, which has the default policy to restart in case of all Exception cases (with the notable exceptions of ActorInitializationException and ActorKilledException). Since the default directive in case of a restart is to kill all children, we expected our poor child not to survive this failure.

In case this is not desired (which depends on the use case), we need to use a different supervisor which overrides this behavior.

protoactor docs