Improving Flink broadcast performance - apache-flink

I've a pipeline where I'm applying transformation rules(from broadcast state) on a stream of events; when I run broadcast stream and original stream in parallel without connecting, stream performance is really good, but the moment I do broadcast performance goes down drastically. How can I achieve better performance. Data passed between operators are in byte[] and data footprint is small as well.
I've attached snapshots of both scenarios:
Top row shows stream consuming events from Kafka and bottom row
shows rules consumed from another topic. With this setup I could
achieve throughput of upto ~20K msg/sec per task manager  processing
12Gb of data in 4mins
2. I've connected the broadcast stream with the data stream for
processing in future . Note that only to measure performance of
broadcast I've made sure no records are consumed in the data
stream(top row). At the processing side of the broadcast state, i'm
only store received messages to MapState. With this setup I can get
throughput of upto ~1000 msg/sec per task manager processing 12Gb of
data in 18mins.

You've done more than simply connect the broadcast and keyed streams. Before, each event went through just one network shuffle (the rebalance, hash, and broadcast connections), and now there are four or five shuffles for each event.
Every shuffle is expensive. Try to reduce the number of times you change parallelism or use keyBy.

Related

Why does the kinesis shard iterator falls behind when using BoundedOutOfOrdernessTimestampExtractor

I'm using KDA with a flink job which should analyse messages emitted by a different IOT device sources. There is a kinesis stream with 4 shards with each of them contains more or less the same amount of data (there are no hot shards). The kinesis stream gets filled by AWS Greengrass Streammanager which is using an increasing sequence number as partition key. Each message contains a single value (something like temperature = 5).
As with this setup the stream read by the kinesis consumer in flink is unordered. But I need to preserve the order of the messages. To do so I have written a small buffer function which is more or less the logic from CepOperator to buffer messages and restore the order. Therefore the stream is keyed by the id of a message. Let's say a temperature message has always a unique id and therefore the stream is keyed by this id.
To create the respective watermarks I'm using the FlinkKinesisConsumer and register there a BoundedOutOfOrdernessTimestampExtractor. If I now use a out-of-orderness time of 10 seconds everything works fine except that I have almost 50% of late arrivals which is not the desired behaviour. But now if I increase the time to 60 seconds the iterator of the kinesis stream falls significantly behind (linear growing over time). The documentation of the Kinesis Consumer does say a little about the settings here. I have also tried to register a JobManagerWatermarkTracker but it seems that it does not change the behaviour.
I do not understand the circumstances why a higher out of orderness leads the iterator to fall behind increasingly but a smaller time setting drops a significant amount of messages. What measures do I need to take to find the proper settings or is my implementation wrong?
UPDATE:
While investigating the issue I have found that if the JobManagerWatermarkTracker isn't properly configured (I still don't understand how to configure) the alignment to the global watermark stops subtasks from reading from the kinesis stream which causes the iterator to fall back. I have calculated a delta how much "latency" a dropped event has and set this as and out-of-orderness (in this case 60 secs). With deactivating the JobManagerWatermarkTracker everything work as expected.
Furthermore it seems that the AWS Greengrass Streammanager isn't optimal for such use cases as it distributes the load evenly across shards but with an increasing number of shards this isn't optimal since one temperature datapoint might be spread across all shards of a stream. That introduces a lot unnecessary latency. I appreciate any input howto configure the JobManagerWatermarkTracker

how do I scale out Flink while sharing the same state?

The semantic of the workload is the following:
Flink operator reads events from the same Kafka topic. Each event needs to be processed by an expensive function f exactly once, ideally, if not at least once. There is correlation between events so each event should be processed based on the cumulative state (accumulated by events from initial state).
How can we scale horizontally for this use case in Flink? I want to process events concurrently but all event processing depends on the same state. In my use case the size of the state will first climb to and then fluctuate around one terabyte.
If your application needs to have a single, centralized data structure that is accessible to every event, then that application won't be horizontally scalable.
Flink approaches horizontal scaling by independently processing partitions of the data streams. This is usually done by computing a key from every event, and partitioning the stream around that key. State is maintained independently for each distinct key, and the limit to horizontal scaling is the number of distinct keys (the size of the key space). Rescaling is handled automatically, and is implemented by re-sharding the set of keys among the parallel instances.
Flink also supports non-keyed state, but the basic principle still applies: scaling can only be achieved by partitioning the stream, and maintaining state independently within each partition.

How to aggregate date by some key on same slot in flink so that i can save network calls

My flink job as of now does KeyBy on client id and thes uses window operator to accumulate data for 1 minute and then aggregates data. After aggregation we sink these accumulated data in hdfs files. Number of unique keys(client id) are more than 70 millions daily.
Issue is when we do keyBy it distributes data on cluster(my assumption) but i want data to be aggregated for 1 minute on same slot(or node) for incoming events.
NOTE : In sink we can have multiple data for same client for 1 minute window. I want to save network calls.
You're right that doing a stream.keyBy() will cause network traffic when the data is partitioned/distributed (assuming you have parallelism > 1, of course). But the standard window operators require a keyed stream.
You could create a ProcessFunction that implements the CheckpointedFunction interface, and use that to maintain state in an unkeyed stream. But you'd still have to implement your own timers (standard Flink timers require a keyed stream), and save the time windows as part of the state.
You could write your own custom RichFlatMapFunction, and have an in-memory Map<time window, Map<ip address, count>> do to pre-keyed aggregations. You'd still need to follow this with a keyBy() and window operation to do the aggregation, but there would be much less network traffic.
I think it's OK that this is stateless. Though you'd likely need to make this an LRU cache, to avoid blowing memory. And you'd need to create your own timer to flush the windows.
But the golden rule is to measure first, the optimize. As in confirming that network traffic really is a problem, before performing helicopter stunts to try to reduce it.

Enrich fast stream keyed by (X,Y) with a slowly change stream keyed by (X) in Flink

I need to enrich my fast changing streamA keyed by (userId, startTripTimestamp) with slowly changing streamB keyed by (userId).
I use Flink 1.8 with DataStream API. I consider 2 approaches:
Broadcast streamB and join stream by userId and most recent timestamp. Would it be equivalent of DynamicTable from the TableAPI? I can see some downsides of this solution: streamB needs to fit into RAM of each worker node, it increase utilization of RAM as whole streamB needs to be stored in RAM of each worker.
Generalise state of streamA to a stream keyed by just (userId), let's name it streamC, to have common key with the streamB. Then I am able to union streamC with streamB, order by processing time, and handle both types of events in state. It's more complex to handle generaised stream (more code in the process function), but not consume that much RAM to have all streamB on all nodes. Are they any more downsides or upsides of this solution?
I have also seen this proposal https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-17+Side+Inputs+for+DataStream+API where it is said:
In general, most of these follow the pattern of joining a main stream
of high throughput with one or several inputs of slowly changing or
static data:
[...]
Join stream with slowly evolving data: This is very similar to
the above case but the side input that we use for enriching is
evolving over time. This can be done by waiting for some initial data
to be available before processing the main input and the continuously
ingesting new data into the internal side input structure as it
arrives.
Unfortunately, it looks like a long time ahead to reach this feature https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-6131 and no alternatives are described. Therefore I would like to ask of the currently recommended approach for the described use case.
I've seen Combining low-latency streams with multiple meta-data streams in Flink (enrichment), but it not specify what are keys of that streams, and moreover it is answered at the time of Flink 1.4, so I expect the recommended solution might have changed.
Building on top of what Gaurav Kumar has already answered.
The main question is do you need to exactly match records from streamA and streamB or is it best effort match? For example, is it an issue for you, that because of a race condition some (a lot of?) records from streamA can be processed before some updates from streamB arrive, for example during the start up?
I would suggest to draw an inspiration from how Table API is solving this issue. Probably Temporal Table Join is the right choice for you, which would leave you with the choice: processing time or event time?
Both of the Gaurav Kumar's proposal are implementations of processing time Temporal Table joins, which assumes that records can be very loosely joined and do not have to timed properly.
If records from streamA and streamB have to be timed properly, then one way or another you have to buffer some of the records from both of the streams. There are various of ways how to do it, depending on what semantic you want to achieve. After deciding on that, the actual implementation is not that difficult and you can draw an inspiration from Table API join operators (org.apache.flink.table.runtime.join package in flink-table-planner module).
Side inputs (that you referenced) and/or input selection are just tools for controlling the amount of unnecessary buffered records. You can implement a valid Flink job without them, but the memory consumption can be hard to control if one stream significantly overtakes the other (in terms of event time - for processing time it's non-issue).
The answer depends on size of your state of streamB that needs to be used to enrich streamA
If you broadcast your streamB state, then you are putting all userIDs from streamB to each of the task managers. Each task on task manager will only have a subset of these userIds from streamA on it. So some userId data from streamB will never be used and will stay as a waste. So if you think that the size of streamB state is not big enough to really impact your job and doesn't take significant memory to leave less memory for state management, you can keep the whole streamB state. This is your #1.
If your streamB state is really huge and can consume considerable memory on task managers, you should consider approach #2. KeyBy same Id both the streams to make sure that elements with same userID reach the same tasks, and then you can use managed state to maintain the per key streamB state and enrich streamA elements using this managed state.

What do terms like Hash, Forward mean in the Flink plan?

This is an image of the Flink plan that appears on the dashboard when I deploy my job. As you can see, the connections between operators are marked as FORWARD/HASH etc. What do they refer to? When is something called a HASH and when is something called a FORWARD?
Please refer to the below Job Graph (Fraud Detection using Flink).
The FORWARD connection means that all data consumed by one of the parallel instances of the Source operator is transferred to exactly one instance of the subsequent operator. It also indicates the same level of parallelism of the two connected operators.
The HASH connection between DynamicKeyFunction and DynamicAlertFunction means that for each message a hash code is calculated and messages are evenly distributed among available parallel instances of the next operator. Such a connection needs to be explicitly “requested” from Flink by using keyBy.
A REBALANCE distribution is either caused by an explicit call to rebalance() or by a change of parallelism (12 -> 1 in the case of the job graph from Figure 2). Calling rebalance() causes data to be repartitioned in a round-robin fashion and can help to mitigate data skew in certain scenarios.
The Fraud Detection job graph in Figure 2 contains an additional data source: Rules Source. It also consumes from Kafka. Rules are “mixed into” the main processing data flow through the BROADCAST channel. Unlike other methods of transmitting data between operators, such as forward, hash or rebalance that make each message available for processing in only one of the parallel instances of the receiving operator, broadcast makes each message available at the input of all of the parallel instances of the operator to which the broadcast stream is connected. This makes broadcast applicable to a wide range of tasks that need to affect the processing of all messages, regardless of their key or source partition.
Reference Document.
First of all, as we know, a Flink streaming job will be splitted into several tasks according to its job graph(or DAG). The FORWARD/HASH is a partitioner between the upstream tasks and downstream tasks, which is used to partition data from the input.
What is Forward? And When does Forward occur?
This means the partitioner will forwards elements only to the locally running downstream tasks. Forward is the default partitioner if you don't specify any partitioner directly or use the functions with partitioner like reblance/keyBy.
What is Hash? And When does Hash occur?
This is a partitioner that partition the records based on the key group index. It occurs when you call keyBy.

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