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Named child runs that survive migration and resurrection #1127
Description
Activity
Three things worth pinning down in the design, from comparing the orchestrator and the skill in apify/agent-skills#90:
use_statepersists on interval and onMIGRATING. A hard kill (OOM, timeout) betweenstartreturning and the next persist leaves an orphan child that gets started again after resurrection. The registry should write the name → run ID entry to the KVS synchronously afterstartreturns, not wait for the periodic persist. The full fix is an idempotency key on the run-start endpoint scoped to the parent run, which I'll raise with the platform team separately.- Rejoin rule for a recorded run:
READY/RUNNING→ attach,SUCCEEDED→ return as is,ABORTED/TIMED-OUT→ resurrect it (Actors are expected to be resumable, and it's cheaper than starting over),FAILED→ start a new run under the same name and keep the old one in history. The orchestrator restarts in all the non-OK cases; the skill asks for resurrection. I'd go with resurrect. - Names should be explicit. The orchestrator falls back to hashing (actor id, input, options) and then has to throw
AmbiguousRunRequestErrorwhen the same unnamed call happens twice in one process. Requiringnameavoids that class of surprise.
- added a commit that references this issue
on Oct 9, 2026
When an Actor migrates or is resurrected, the process restarts and every in-flight
Actor.callislost. Nothing records which child runs were already started, so the restarted Actor starts them all
over again, paying twice and duplicating the work. A user cannot fix this from the outside, because
only the SDK sees the migration.
Proposal
An optional name on
Actor.start/Actor.call:With a
name, the SDK keeps a name → run ID map in the key-value store and reattaches to therecorded run after a restart. A new run is started only when nothing is recorded under that name, or
the recorded one ended in a state that cannot be resumed.
Actor.use_state(src/apify/_actor.py:1429) already provides a KVS-backed dict that survivesmigration, so the registry can be built on it.
Prior art
apify-orchestrator, which splits this into a tracker and a find-or-start step:
✍️ Drafted by Claude Code