Uploaded image for project: 'Flink'
  1. Flink
  2. FLINK-21884

Reduce TaskManager failure detection time

    XMLWordPrintableJSON

Details

    • Improvement
    • Status: Closed
    • Critical
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • 1.14.0, 1.13.2
    • 1.15.0
    • Runtime / Coordination

    Description

      In Flink 1.13 (and older versions), TaskManager failures stall the processing for a significant amount of time, even though the system gets indications for the failure almost immediately through network connection losses.

      This is due to a high (default) heartbeat timeout of 50 seconds [1] to accommodate for GC pauses, transient network disruptions or generally slow environments (otherwise, we would unregister a healthy TaskManager).

      Such a high timeout can lead to disruptions in the processing (no processing for certain periods, high latencies, buildup of consumer lag etc.). In Reactive Mode (FLINK-10407), the issue surfaces on scale-down events, where the loss of a TaskManager is immediately visible in the logs, but the job is stuck in "FAILING" for quite a while until the TaskManger is really deregistered. (Note that this issue is not that critical in a autoscaling setup, because Flink can control the scale-down events and trigger them proactively)

      On the attached metrics dashboard, one can see that the job has significant throughput drops / consumer lags during scale down (and also CPU usage spikes on processing the queued events, leading to incorrect scale up events again).

      One idea to solve this problem is to:

      • Score TaskManagers based on certain signals (# exceptions reported, exception types (connection losses, akka failures), failure frequencies, ...) and blacklist them accordingly.
      • Introduce a best-effort TaskManager unregistration mechanism: When a TaskManager receives a sigterm, it sends a final message to the JobManager saying "goodbye", and the JobManager can immediately remove the TM from its bookkeeping.

      [1] https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-master/docs/deployment/config/#heartbeat-timeout

      Attachments

        1. image-2021-03-19-20-10-40-324.png
          342 kB
          Robert Metzger

        Issue Links

          Activity

            People

              Unassigned Unassigned
              rmetzger Robert Metzger
              Votes:
              0 Vote for this issue
              Watchers:
              10 Start watching this issue

              Dates

                Created:
                Updated:
                Resolved: