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Ask Pattern Timeout Warning #

Akka’s ask pattern provides an easy way to send a message to an actor and expect to receive a response from it. For this to work properly the ask pattern needs to take care of several details, but to keep it short in this section we will mention only two:

• sending a message to an actor doesn’t mean it will reply, it does not even mean that it will process it.
• Scala Futures do not timeout, you need to fulfill your promises.

In order to ensure that the Future you get when using the ask pattern is always fulfilled an action that completes the future with a AskTimeoutException is scheduled using the provided timeout, and that action is canceled if the target actor replies in a timely fashion to the message. By doing this, it doesn’t matter if the actor you are asking for something replies, fails or is unavailable, your future will always be completed with something. To get practical, picture a piece of code like the following making use of the ask pattern:

    (dumbActor ? "Hello") onFailure {
      case t: Throwable => t.printStackTrace()
    }

What happens when the timeout is reached and there is no reply from the actor? well, your future is completed with an exception that looks like this one:

akka.pattern.AskTimeoutException: Ask timed out on [Actor[akka://ask-pattern-timeout-warning/user/dumb-actor#778114812]] after [2000 ms]
	at akka.pattern.PromiseActorRef$$anonfun$1.apply$mcV$sp(AskSupport.scala:335)
	at akka.actor.Scheduler$$anon$7.run(Scheduler.scala:117)
	at scala.concurrent.Future$InternalCallbackExecutor$.unbatchedExecute(Future.scala:599)
	at scala.concurrent.BatchingExecutor$class.execute(BatchingExecutor.scala:109)
	at scala.concurrent.Future$InternalCallbackExecutor$.execute(Future.scala:597)
	at akka.actor.LightArrayRevolverScheduler$TaskHolder.executeTask(Scheduler.scala:467)
	at akka.actor.LightArrayRevolverScheduler$$anon$8.executeBucket$1(Scheduler.scala:419)
	at akka.actor.LightArrayRevolverScheduler$$anon$8.nextTick(Scheduler.scala:423)
	at akka.actor.LightArrayRevolverScheduler$$anon$8.run(Scheduler.scala:375)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

If your application code is making use of the ask pattern then you should be familiar (and probably not friends) with that message. It is nice to know that a message timed out, but where was that message sent from? it might be simple to find that out if you are sending messages from a single location in your code, but once you start composing ask-generated futures it can get much more complicated to know exactly what timed out, as one failure will be propagated through the whole composition and you won’t know for sure which one failed.

One way to deal with this problem would be to add a transformation to each ask-generated future that you get, so that if a future fails with a Failure(AskTimeoutException) you can turn it into a Failure(SomeRecognizibleException) and you can know for sure what failed. This implies a bit more of coding, but certainly seems to be the safest way to proceed.

Nevertheless, sometimes you can’t introduce these code changes but you still need to know what is going on. If you get to this point, Kamon offers you the possibility to gather information about the call sites where the ask pattern was used and log a warning message with this info in case the ask times out. You can enable this timeout warning by setting the kamon.akka.ask-pattern-timeout-warning configuration key. This warning comes in two flavors as described below:

Lightweight Warning #

When the warning setting is set to lightweight, Kamon will log a simple warning telling you the file and line number (if available) from which the ask that timed out was called. The message for the example above looks like this:

Timeout triggered for ask pattern to actor [dumb-actor] at [AskPatternTimeoutWarning.scala:21]

This approach works nicely when you are using the ask pattern directly in your codebase and thanks to some AspectJ features we can capture the source code location of the ask usage practically without overhead.

Heavyweight Warning #

Sometimes you are not using the ask pattern directly, but you use some library that uses it internally and just having the source call location of the ask isn’t enough, but you rather need the full stack trace to know what piece of your code is triggering the ask. In these cases, you can set the warning setting to heavyweight and Kamon will capture the full stack trace when the ask is triggered and include it in the warning message if the ask times out. That’s why we call it “heavyweight”, it will always create an exception to capture the stack trace, but only log it if the ask times out, and, taking the exception consumes a bit of resources. Depending on how heavily your application uses the ask pattern, the extra overhead might be tolerable, but that is up to you to decide.

When using the heavyweight mode, the logged warning message looks like this:

Timeout triggered for ask pattern to actor [dumb-actor] at [kamon.akka.examples.scala.AskPatternTimeoutWarning$$anonfun$1.apply(AskPatternTimeoutWarning.scala:21)
kamon.trace.Tracer$$anonfun$withNewContext$1.apply(TracerModule.scala:66)
kamon.trace.Tracer$.withContext(TracerModule.scala:57)
kamon.trace.Tracer$.withNewContext(TracerModule.scala:65)
kamon.trace.Tracer$.withNewContext(TracerModule.scala:75)
kamon.akka.examples.scala.AskPatternTimeoutWarning$.delayedEndpoint$kamon$akka$examples$scala$AskPatternTimeoutWarning$1(AskPatternTimeoutWarning.scala:19)
kamon.akka.examples.scala.AskPatternTimeoutWarning$delayedInit$body.apply(AskPatternTimeoutWarning.scala:11)
scala.Function0$class.apply$mcV$sp(Function0.scala:40)
scala.runtime.AbstractFunction0.apply$mcV$sp(AbstractFunction0.scala:12)
scala.App$$anonfun$main$1.apply(App.scala:76)
scala.App$$anonfun$main$1.apply(App.scala:76)
scala.collection.immutable.List.foreach(List.scala:381)
scala.collection.generic.TraversableForwarder$class.foreach(TraversableForwarder.scala:35)
scala.App$class.main(App.scala:76)
kamon.akka.examples.scala.AskPatternTimeoutWarning$.main(AskPatternTimeoutWarning.scala:11)
kamon.akka.examples.scala.AskPatternTimeoutWarning.main(AskPatternTimeoutWarning.scala)
sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:497)
com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:140)