[KAFKA-8522] Tombstones can survive forever

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 3.1.0
• Component/s: log cleaner
• Assignee: Richard Yu
• Reporter: Evelyn Bayes
• Created: 11/Jun/19 03:31
• Updated: 20/Sep/21 23:52
• Resolved: 16/Sep/21 16:18

Description

This is a bit grey zone as to whether it's a "bug" but it is certainly unintended behaviour.

 

Under specific conditions tombstones effectively survive forever:

• Small amount of throughput;

• min.cleanable.dirty.ratio near or at 0; and

• Other parameters at default.

What  happens is all the data continuously gets cycled into the oldest segment. Old records get compacted away, but the new records continuously update the timestamp of the oldest segment reseting the countdown for deleting tombstones.

So tombstones build up in the oldest segment forever.

 

While you could "fix" this by reducing the segment size, this can be undesirable as a sudden change in throughput could cause a dangerous number of segments to be created.

Issue Links

• relates to: KAFKA-4545 tombstone needs to be removed after delete.retention.ms has passed after it has been cleaned
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #7175
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #7600
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #7884
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #10914
• links to: Pull Reqeust #9915