Lifecycle & Config

Actor Statuses

Understand the lifecycle statuses of Rivet Actors, what they mean, how they appear in the API, and how to troubleshoot common issues.

Statuses

These are the statuses you can see in the dashboard for each actor.

Status	Description
Starting	The actor has been created and a runner has been allocated, but the actor process has not yet reported that it is ready.
Running	The actor is live and accepting connections.
Stopped	The actor has been gracefully destroyed.
Crashed	The actor failed to start or encountered a fatal error. See Troubleshooting for common failure reasons.
Sleeping	The actor has been put to sleep from inactivity. It will be woken up automatically when a new request arrives.
Pending	The actor is waiting to be allocated to a runner. This happens when no runner is available to handle the actor. See Troubleshooting for common causes.
Crash-Loop	The actor failed to allocate and is waiting to retry with a backoff. This typically means repeated allocation failures. The backoff prevents overloading your infrastructure in the case of a widespread misconfiguration in your backend. See Troubleshooting for common failure reasons.

The actor object returned by the API includes the following timestamp fields used to derive status:

Field	Description
`createTs`	When the actor was first created. Always present.
`connectableTs`	When the actor became connectable. Null if not yet running.
`destroyTs`	When the actor was destroyed.
`sleepTs`	When the actor entered a sleeping state.
`pendingAllocationTs`	When the actor started waiting for an allocation.
`rescheduleTs`	When the actor will retry allocation after a failure.
`error`	Error details if the actor failed.