akka.actor.InvalidActorNameException: actor name [xxx] is not unique!

[Kane Lai]

Hi,

I'm trying to manually restart the akka hierarchy because I'm implementing something like hot-reload config mechanism.

I send a Kill to a top level actor and set the supervisor strategy for ActorKilledException to Restart. Everything works fine so far.

Then during restart, in the top level actor constructor I recreate the child actors like this. Then the InvalidActorNameException is seen. May I know what's the usual practice to handle this? How could I recreate and name the reborn child actors?

Thanks.

val worker =
  context.actorOf(
    TcpServerWorker.props(
      self,
      config.operationSetConfig.tcpListenHost.get,
      config.operationSetConfig.tcpListenPort.get),
    "tcpServer")

Kane

[Ryan Tanner]

From the documentation on stopping actors:

Since stopping an actor is asynchronous, you cannot immediately reuse the name of the child you just stopped; this will result in an InvalidActorNameException. Instead, watch the terminating actor and create its replacement in response to the Terminated message which will eventually arrive.

http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.3.9/scala/actors.html#Stopping_actors

[Patrik Nordwall]

It should be possible to restart without having the name collision of the child. Do you override the preRestart method? By default preRestart stops all children and waits (non-blocking) until they are terminated. This is explained in What Restarting Means

Ryan's observation is important for another scenario, e.g. this will not work:

val child = context.actorOf(Props[Child], "child")

context.stop(child)

context.actorOf(Props[Child], "child") // boom

Cheers,

Patrik

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Patrik Nordwall
Typesafe -  Reactive apps on the JVM
Twitter: @patriknw