How to deal with long initialization of an Akka child actor?

Question

I have an actor which creates a child actor to perform some lengthy computations.

The problem is that the initialization of the child actor takes a few seconds and all messages that the parent actor sends to the child between it is created and gets fully initialized are dropped.

This is the logic of the code that I am using:

class ChildActor extends Actor {
  val tagger = IntializeTagger(...) // this takes a few seconds to complete

  def receive = {
    case Tag(text) => sender ! tagger.tag(text)
    case "hello" => println("Hello")
    case _ => println("Unknown message")
  }
}

class ParentActor extends Actor {
  val child = context.ActorOf(Props[ChildActor], name = "childactor")

  // the below two messages seem to get lost
  child ! "hello"
  child ! Tag("This is my sample text")

  def receive = {
     ...
  }
}

How could I get around that problem? Is it possible to make the parent actor wait until the child is fully initialized? I will be using the child actor with routing and possibly on remote actor systems.

EDIT

Following drexin's advice I have change my code into:

class ChildActor extends Actor {
  var tagger: Tagger = _

  override def preStart() = {
    tagger = IntializeTagger(...) // this takes a few seconds to complete
  }

  def receive = {
    case Tag(text) => sender ! tagger.tag(text)
    case "hello" => println("Hello")
    case _ => println("Unknown message")
  }
}

class ParentActor extends Actor {
  var child: ActorRef = _

  override def preStart() = {
    child = context.ActorOf(Props[ChildActor], name = "childactor")

    // When I add
    // Thread.sleep(5000)
    // here messages are processed without problems

    // wihout hardcoding the 5 seconds waiting 
    // the below two messages seem to get lost
    child ! "hello"
    child ! Tag("This is my sample text")
  }

  def receive = {
     ...
  }
}

but the problem remains. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Don't initialize the tagger in the constructor, but in the preStart hook, this way the messages will be collected in the message box and delivered, when the actor is ready.

edit:

You should do the same for the actor creation in your ParentActor class, because you would have the same problem, if the ChildActor would respond, before the ParentActor is initialized.

edit2:

I created a simple example, but I was not able to reproduce your problems. Following code works perfectly fine:

import akka.actor._

case class Tag(x: String)

class ChildActor extends Actor {
  type Tagger = String => String
  var tagger: Tagger = _

  override def preStart() = {
    tagger = (x: String) => x+"@tagged" // this takes a few seconds to complete
    Thread.sleep(2000) // simulate time taken to initialize Tagger
  }

  def receive = {
    case Tag(text) => sender ! tagger(text)
    case "hello" => println("Hello")
    case _ => println("Unknown message")
  }
}

class ParentActor extends Actor {
  var child: ActorRef = _

  override def preStart() = {
    child = context.actorOf(Props[ChildActor], name = "childactor")

    // When I add
    // Thread.sleep(5000)
    // here messages are processed without problems

    // wihout hardcoding the 5 seconds waiting 
    // the below two messages seem to get lost
    child ! "hello"
    child ! Tag("This is my sample text")
  }

  def receive = {
    case x => println(x)
  }
}

object Main extends App {

  val system = ActorSystem("MySystem")

  system.actorOf(Props[ParentActor])
}

Output is:

[info] Running Main
Hello
This is my sample text@tagged