[FLINK-30258] PyFlink supports closing loopback server

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.16.0
• Component/s: API / Python
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Xuannan Su
• Created: 01/Dec/22 09:07
• Updated: 01/Dec/22 09:08

Description

Currently, a loopback server will be started whenever a StreamExecutionEnvironment or StreamTableEnvironment is created. The loopback server can only be closed after the process exit. This might not be a problem for regular uses where only one environment object is used.

However, when running tests, such as the unit tests for PyFlink itself, as the environment objects are created, the process starts more and more loopback servers and takes more and more resources.

Therefore, we want to support closing the loopback server.