TL;DR: I have some reservations but tend to be +1 for the proposal, meanwhile suggest we have a more thorough solution in the long run.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the root cause of the issue is too many small files generated. I have some concerns for the case of session cluster [1], as well as possible issues for users at large scale, otherwise I think increasing `state.backend.fs.memory-threshold` to 100K is a good choice, based on the assumption that a large portion of our users are running small jobs with small states. OTOH, maybe extending the solution [2] of resolving RocksDB small file problem (as proposed by FLINK-11937 [3]) to also support operator state could be an alternative? We have already applied the solution in production for operator state and solved the HDFS NN RPC bottleneck problem on last year's Singles' day. Best Regards, Yu [1] https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-stable/concepts/glossary.html#flink-session-cluster [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ukLfqNt44yqhDFL3uIhd68NevVdawccb6GflGNFzLcg <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ukLfqNt44yqhDFL3uIhd68NevVdawccb6GflGNFzLcg/edit#heading=h.rl48knhoni0h> [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-11937 On Thu, 14 May 2020 at 21:45, Till Rohrmann <trohrm...@apache.org> wrote: > I cannot say much about the concrete value but if our users have problems > with the existing default values, then it makes sense to me to change it. > > One thing to check could be whether it is possible to provide a meaningful > exception in case that the state size exceeds the frame size. At the > moment, Flink should fail with a message saying that a rpc message exceeds > the maximum frame size. Maybe it is also possible to point the user towards > "state.backend.fs.memory-threshold" if the message exceeds the frame size > because of too much state. > > Cheers, > Till > > On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 2:34 PM Stephan Ewen <se...@apache.org> wrote: > >> The parameter "state.backend.fs.memory-threshold" decides when a state >> will >> become a file and when it will be stored inline with the metadata (to >> avoid >> excessive amounts of small files). >> >> By default, this threshold is 1K - so every state above that size becomes >> a >> file. For many cases, this threshold seems to be too low. >> There is an interesting talk with background on this from Scott Kidder: >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gycq0cY3TZ0 >> >> I wanted to discuss increasing this to 100K by default. >> >> Advantage: >> - This should help many users out of the box, which otherwise see >> checkpointing problems on systems like S3, GCS, etc. >> >> Disadvantage: >> - For very large jobs, this increases the required heap memory on the JM >> side, because more state needs to be kept in-line when gathering the acks >> for a pending checkpoint. >> - If tasks have a lot of states and each state is roughly at this >> threshold, we increase the chance of exceeding the RPC frame size and >> failing the job. >> >> What do you think? >> >> Best, >> Stephan >> >
