Kinesis Data Analytics Flink: Continually Increasing Checkpoint Size - apache-flink

I am running a Flink application using the AWS Kinesis Data Analytics (KDA) service. My KDA Flink application last checkpoint size appears to be growing steadily over time. The sudden drops in checkpoint size you can see in the attached graph correspond with when I pushed changes out to the app, causing it to take a snapshot, update, and then restore from the snapshot. My concern is that once the application is no longer being actively developed, changes will not be deployed as regularly, and the checkpoint size could grow to eventually be too large.
Does anyone know what would cause the checkpoint size to grow continuously without end? I am using State TTL on all significant state and removing state in application code when it is no longer needed. Does the checkpoint size increasing indicate I have a bug in the code that handles state, or is something else potentially at play here?

Update: See https://stackoverflow.com/a/67435073/2000823 for a better answer.
AWS Kinesis Data Analytics (KDA) is currently based on Flink 1.8, where this documentation regarding state cleanup applies.
Note that
by default if expired state is not read, it won’t be removed, possibly leading to ever growing state
You can also activate cleanup during full snapshots (which seems to be occurring), and background cleanup (which sounds like what you want). Note that for some workloads, even if background cleanup is enabled, the default settings for background cleanup might be insufficient to keep up with the rate at which state should be cleaned up, and some tuning might be necessary.
By the way, background cleanup is enabled by default since Flink 1.10.
If this doesn't answer your question, please clarify precisely how state TTL is configured.

Related

Apache Flink Checkpoining (Manually put a value into RocksDB Checkpoint and retrieve during recovery or Restart)

We have a scenario where we have to persist/save some value into the checkpoint and retrieve it back during failure recovery/application restart.
We followed a few things like ValueState, ValueStateDescriptor still not working.
https://github.com/realtime-storage-engine/flink-spillable-statebackend/blob/master/flink-spillable-benchmark/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/spillable/benchmark/WordCount.java
https://towardsdatascience.com/heres-how-flink-stores-your-state-7b37fbb60e1a
https://github.com/king/flink-state-cache/blob/master/examples/src/main/java/com/king/flink/state/Example.java
We can't externalize it to a DB as it may cause some performance issues.
Any lead to this will be helpful using checkpoint. How to put and get back from a Checkpoint?
All of your managed application state is automatically written into Flink checkpoints (and savepoints). This includes
keyed state (ValueState, ListState, MapState, etc)
operator state (ListState, BroadcastState, etc)
timers
This state is automatically restored during recovery, and can optionally be restored during manual restarts.
The Flink Operations Playground shows how to work with checkpoints and savepoints, and lets you observe their behavior during failure/recovery and restarts/rescaling.
If you want to read from a checkpoint yourself, that's what the State Processor API is for. Here's an example.

Flink - Lazy start with operators working during savepoint startup

I am using Apache Flink with RocksDBStateBackend and going through some trouble when the job is restarted using a savepoint.
Apparently, it takes some time for the state to be ready again, but even though the state isn't ready yet, DataStreams from Kafka seems to be moving data around, which causes some invalid misses as the state isn't ready yet for my KeyedProcessFunction.
Is it the expected behavior? I couldn't find anything in the documentation, and apparently, no related configuration.
The ideal for us would be to have the state fully ready to be queried before any data is moved.
For example, this shows that during a deployment, the estimate_num_keys metric was slowly increasing.
However, if we look at an application counter from an operator, they were working during that "warm-up phase".
I found some discussion here Apache flink: Lazy load from save point for RocksDB backend where it was suggested to use Externalized Checkpoints.
I will look into it, but currently, our state isn't too big (~150 GB), so I am not sure if that is the only path to try.
Starting a Flink job that uses RocksDB from a savepoint is an expensive operation, as all of the state must first be loaded from the savepoint into new RocksDB instances. On the other hand, if you use a retained, incremental checkpoint, then the SST files in that checkpoint can be used directly by RocksDB, leading to must faster start-up times.
But, while it's normal for starting from a savepoint to be expensive, this shouldn't lead to any errors or dropped data.

Flink task managers are not processing data after restart

I am new to flink and i deployed my flink application which basically perform simple pattern matching. It is deployed in Kubernetes cluster with 1 JM and 6 TM. I am sending messages of size 4.4k and 200k messages every 10 min to eventhub topic and performing load testing. I added restart strategy and checking pointing as below and i am not explicitly using any states in my code as there is no requirement for it
StreamExecutionEnvironment env = StreamExecutionEnvironment.getExecutionEnvironment();
// start a checkpoint every 1000 ms
env.enableCheckpointing(interval, CheckpointingMode.EXACTLY_ONCE);
// advanced options:
// make sure 500 ms of progress happen between checkpoints
env.getCheckpointConfig().setMinPauseBetweenCheckpoints(1000);
// checkpoints have to complete within one minute, or are discarded
env.getCheckpointConfig().setCheckpointTimeout(120000);
// allow only one checkpoint to be in progress at the same time
env.getCheckpointConfig().setMaxConcurrentCheckpoints(1);
// enable externalized checkpoints which are retained after job cancellation
env.getCheckpointConfig().enableExternalizedCheckpoints(CheckpointConfig.ExternalizedCheckpointCleanup.RETAIN_ON_CANCELLATION);
// allow job recovery fallback to checkpoint when there is a more recent savepoint
env.getCheckpointConfig().setPreferCheckpointForRecovery(true);
env.setRestartStrategy(RestartStrategies.fixedDelayRestart(
5, // number of restart attempts
Time.of(5, TimeUnit.MINUTES) // delay
));
Initially i was facing Netty server issue with network buffer and i followed this link https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-release-1.11/ops/config.html#taskmanager-network-memory-floating-buffers-per-gate flink network and heap memory optimizations and applied below settings and everything is working fine
taskmanager.network.memory.min: 256mb
taskmanager.network.memory.max: 1024mb
taskmanager.network.memory.buffers-per-channel: 8
taskmanager.memory.segment-size: 2mb
taskmanager.network.memory.floating-buffers-per-gate: 16
cluster.evenly-spread-out-slots: true
taskmanager.heap.size: 1024m
taskmanager.memory.framework.heap.size: 64mb
taskmanager.memory.managed.fraction: 0.7
taskmanager.memory.framework.off-heap.size: 64mb
taskmanager.memory.network.fraction: 0.4
taskmanager.memory.jvm-overhead.min: 256mb
taskmanager.memory.jvm-overhead.max: 1gb
taskmanager.memory.jvm-overhead.fraction: 0.4
But i have two below questions
If any task manager restarts because of any failures the task manager is restarting successfully and getting registered with job manager but after the restarted task manager don't perform any processing of data it will sit idle. Is this normal flink behavior or do i need to add any setting to make task manager to start processing again.
Sorry and correct me if my understanding is wrong, flink has a restart strategy in my code i made limit 5 attempts of restart. What will happen if my flink job is not successfully overcomes the task failure entire flink job will be remained in idle state and i have to restart job manually or is there any mechanism i can add to restart my job even after it crossed the limit of restart job attempts.
Is there any document to calculate the number of cores and memory i should assign to flink job cluster based on data size and rate at which my system receives the data ?
Is there any documentation on flink CEP optimization techniques?
This is the error stack trace i am seeing in job manager
I am seeing the below errors in my job manager logs before the pattern matching
Caused by: org.apache.flink.runtime.io.network.netty.exception.RemoteTransportException: Connection unexpectedly closed by remote task manager '/10.244.9.163:46377'. This might indicate that the remote task manager was lost.
at org.apache.flink.runtime.io.network.netty.CreditBasedPartitionRequestClientHandler.channelInactive(CreditBasedPartitionRequestClientHandler.java:136)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.invokeChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:257)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.invokeChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:243)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.fireChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:236)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.handler.codec.ByteToMessageDecoder.channelInputClosed(ByteToMessageDecoder.java:393)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.handler.codec.ByteToMessageDecoder.channelInactive(ByteToMessageDecoder.java:358)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.invokeChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:257)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.invokeChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:243)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.fireChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:236)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.DefaultChannelPipeline$HeadContext.channelInactive(DefaultChannelPipeline.java:1416)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.invokeChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:257)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannelHandlerContext.invokeChannelInactive(AbstractChannelHandlerContext.java:243)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.DefaultChannelPipeline.fireChannelInactive(DefaultChannelPipeline.java:912)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.AbstractChannel$AbstractUnsafe$8.run(AbstractChannel.java:816)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.util.concurrent.AbstractEventExecutor.safeExecute(AbstractEventExecutor.java:163)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.util.concurrent.SingleThreadEventExecutor.runAllTasks(SingleThreadEventExecutor.java:416)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.channel.nio.NioEventLoop.run(NioEventLoop.java:515)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.util.concurrent.SingleThreadEventExecutor$5.run(SingleThreadEventExecutor.java:918)
at org.apache.flink.shaded.netty4.io.netty.util.internal.ThreadExecutorMap$2.run(ThreadExecutorMap.java:74)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)
Thanks in advance, please help me in resolving my doubts
Various points:
If your patterns involve matching temporal sequences (e.g., "A followed by B"), then you need state to do this. Most of Flink's sources and sinks also use state internally to record offsets, etc., and this state needs to be checkpointed if you care about exactly-once guarantees. If the patterns are being streamed in dynamically, then you'll want to store the patterns in Flink state as well.
Some of the comments in the code don't match the configuration parameters: e.g., "500 ms of progress" vs. 1000, "checkpoints have to complete within one minute" vs 120000. Also, keep in mind that the section of the documentation that you copied these settings from is not recommending best practices, but is instead illustrating how to make changes. In particular, env.getCheckpointConfig().setPreferCheckpointForRecovery(true); is a bad idea, and that config option should probably not exist.
Some of your entries in config.yaml are concerning. taskmanager.memory.managed.fraction is rather large (0.7) -- this only makes sense if you are using RocksDB, since managed memory has no other purpose for streaming. And taskmanager.memory.network.fraction and taskmanager.memory.jvm-overhead.fraction are both very large, and the sum of these three fractions is 1.5, which doesn't make sense.
In general the default network configuration works well across a wide range of deployment scenarios, and it is unusual to need to tune these settings, except in large clusters (which is not the case here). What sort of problems did you encounter?
As for your questions:
After a TM failure and recovery, the TMs should automatically resume processing from the most recent checkpoint. To diagnose why this isn't happening, we'll need more information. To gain experience with a deployment that handles this correctly, you can experiment with the Flink Operations Playground.
Once the configured restart strategy has played itself out, the job will FAIL, and Flink will no longer try to recover that job. You can, of course, build your own automation on top of Flink's REST API, if you want something more sophisticated.
Documentation on capacity planning? No, not really. This is generally figured out through trial and error. Different applications tend to have different requirements in ways that are difficult to anticipate. Things like your choice of serializer, state backend, number of keyBys, the sources and sinks, key skew, watermarking, and so on can all have significant impacts.
Documentation on optimizing CEP? No, sorry. The main points are
do everything you can to constrain the matches; avoid patterns that must keep state indefinitely
getEventsForPattern can be expensive

Checkpointing issues in Flink 1.10.1 using RocksDB state backend

We are experiencing a very difficult-to-observe problem with our Flink job.
The Job is reasonably simple, it:
Reads messages from Kinesis using the Flink Kinesis connector
Keys the messages and distributes them to ~30 different CEP operators, plus a couple of custom WindowFunctions
The messages emitted from the CEP/Windows are forward to a SinkFunction that writes messages to SQS
We are running Flink 1.10.1 Fargate, using 2 containers with 4vCPUs/8GB, we are using the RocksDB state backend with the following configuration:
state.backend: rocksdb
state.backend.async: true
state.backend.incremental: false
state.backend.rocksdb.localdir: /opt/flink/rocksdb
state.backend.rocksdb.ttl.compaction.filter.enabled: true
state.backend.rocksdb.files.open: 130048
The job runs with a parallelism of 8.
When the job starts from cold, it uses very little CPU and checkpoints complete in 2 sec. Over time, the checkpoint sizes increase but the times are still very reasonable couple of seconds:
During this time we can observe the CPU usage of our TaskManagers gently growing for some reason:
Eventually, the checkpoint time will start spiking to a few minutes, and then will just start repeatedly timing out (10 minutes). At this time:
Checkpoint size (when it does complete) is around 60MB
CPU usage is high, but not 100% (usually around 60-80%)
Looking at in-progress checkpoints, usually 95%+ of operators complete the checkpoint with 30 seconds, but a handful will just stick and never complete. The SQS sink will always be included on this, but the SinkFunction is not rich and has no state.
Using the backpressure monitor on these operators reports a HIGH backpressure
Eventually this situation resolves one of 2 ways:
Enough checkpoints fail to trigger the job to fail due to a failed checkpoint proportion threshold
The checkpoints eventually start succeeding, but never go back down to the 5-10s they take initially (when the state size is more like 30MB vs. 60MB)
We are really at a loss at how to debug this. Our state seems very small compared to the kind of state you see in some questions on here. Our volumes are also pretty low, we are very often under 100 records/sec.
We'd really appreciate any input on areas we could look into to debug this.
Thanks,
A few points:
It's not unusual for state to gradually grow over time. Perhaps your key space is growing, and you are keeping some state for each key. If you are relying on state TTL to expire stale state, perhaps it is not configured in a way that allows it clean up expired state as quickly as you would expect. It's also relatively easy to inadvertently create CEP patterns that need to keep some state for a very long time before certain possible matches can be ruled out.
A good next step would be to identify the cause of the backpressure. The most common cause is that a job doesn't have adequate resources. Most jobs gradually come to need more resources over time, as the number of users (for example) being managed rises. For example, you might need to increase the parallelism, or give the instances more memory, or increase the capacity of the sink(s) (or the speed of the network to the sink(s)), or give RocksDB faster disks.
Besides being inadequately provisioned, other causes of backpressure include
blocking i/o is being done in a user function
a large number of timers are firing simultaneously
event time skew between different sources is causing large amounts of state to be buffered
data skew (a hot key) is overwhelming one subtask or slot
lengthy GC pauses
contention for critical resources (e.g., using a NAS as the local disk for RocksDB)
Enabling RocksDB native metrics might provide some insight.
Add this property to your configuration:
state.backend.rocksdb.checkpoint.transfer.thread.num: {threadNumberAccordingYourProjectSize}
if you do not add this , it will be 1 (default)
Link: https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink-state-backends/flink-statebackend-rocksdb/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/contrib/streaming/state/RocksDBOptions.java#L62

How to make Flink job with huge state finish

We are running a Flink cluster to calculate historic terabytes of streaming data. The data calculation has a huge state for which we use keyed states - Value and Map states with RocksDb backend. At some point in the job calculation the job performance starts degrading, input and output rates drop to almost 0. At this point exceptions like 'Communication with Taskmanager X timeout error" can be seen in the logs, however the job is compromised even before.
I presume the problem we are facing has to the with the RocksDb's disk backend. As the state of the job grows it needs to access the Disk more often which drags the performance to 0. We have played with some of the options and have set some which make sense for our particular setup:
We are using the SPINNING_DISK_OPTIMIZED_HIGH_MEM predefined profile, further optimized with optimizeFiltersForHits and some other options which has somewhat improved performance. However not of this can provide a stable computation and on a job re-run against a bigger data set the job halts again.
What we are looking for is a way to modify the job so that it progresses at SOME speed even when the input and the state increases. We are running on AWS with limits set to around 15 GB for Task Manager and no limit on disk space.
using SPINNING_DISK_OPTIMIZED_HIGH_MEM will cost huge off-heap memory by memtable of RocksDB, Seeing as you are running job with memory limitation around 15GB, I think you will encounter the OOM issue, but if you choose the default predefined profile, you will face the write stall issue or CPU overhead by decompressing the page cache of Rocksdb, so I think you should increase the memory limitation.
and here are some post about Rocksdb FYI:
https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/Memory-usage-in-RocksDB
https://www.ververica.com/blog/manage-rocksdb-memory-size-apache-flink

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