Flink Running out of Memory - apache-flink

Question

I have some fairly simple stream code that aggregating data via time windows. The windows are on the large side (1 hour, with a 2 hour bound), and the values in the streams are metrics coming from hundreds of servers. I keep running out of memory, and so I added the RocksDBStateBackend. This caused the JVM to segfault. Next I tried the FsStateBackend. Both of these backends never wrote any data to disk, but simply created a directory with the JobID. I'm running this code in standalone mode, not deployed. Any thoughts as to why the State Backends aren't writing data, and why it runs out of memory even when provided with 8GB of heap?
final SingleOutputStreamOperator<Metric> metricStream =
objectStream.map(node -> new Metric(node.get("_ts").asLong(), node.get("_value").asDouble(), node.get("tags"))).name("metric stream");
final WindowedStream<Metric, String, TimeWindow> hourlyMetricStream = metricStream
.assignTimestampsAndWatermarks(new BoundedOutOfOrdernessTimestampExtractor<Metric>(Time.hours(2)) { // set how long metrics can come late
#Override
public long extractTimestamp(final Metric metric) {
return metric.get_ts() * 1000; // needs to be in ms since Java epoch
}
})
.keyBy(metric -> metric.getMetricName()) // key the stream so we can run the windowing in parallel
.timeWindow(Time.hours(1)); // setup the time window for the bucket
// create a stream for each type of aggregation
hourlyMetricStream.sum("_value") // we want to sum by the _value
.addSink(new MetricStoreSinkFunction(parameters, "sum"))
.name("hourly sum stream")
.setParallelism(6);
hourlyMetricStream.aggregate(new MeanAggregator())
.addSink(new MetricStoreSinkFunction(parameters, "mean"))
.name("hourly mean stream")
.setParallelism(6);
hourlyMetricStream.aggregate(new ReMedianAggregator())
.addSink(new MetricStoreSinkFunction(parameters, "remedian"))
.name("hourly remedian stream")
.setParallelism(6);
env.execute("flink test");

Answer 1

It is tough to say why you would run out of memory unless you have a very large number of metric names (that is the only explanation I can come up with based on the code you posted).
With respect to the disk writing, RocksDB will actually use a temporary directory by default for its actual database files. You can also pass an explicit directory during configuration. You would do this by calling state.setDbStoragePath(someDirectory)
Somewhat confusingly, the FSStateBackend in fact only writes to disk during checkpointing, it otherwise is entirely heap based. So you likely did not see anything in the directory if you did not have checkpointing enabled. So that would explain why you might still run out of memory when the FSStateBackend is used.
Assuming you do have the RocksDB (or any) state backend working, you can enable checkpointing by doing:
env.enableCheckpointing(5000); // value is in MS, so however frequently you want to checkpoint
env.getCheckpointConfig.setMinPauseBetweenCheckpoints(5000); // this is to help prevent your job from making progress if checkpointing takes a bit. For large state checkpointing can take multiple seconds