Hey Jun,

I'd really really really like to avoid that. Having just spent a bunch of
time on the clients, using the error codes to encode other information
about the response is super dangerous. The error handling is one of the
hardest parts of the client (Guozhang chime in here).

Generally the error handling looks like
  if(error == none)
     // good, process the request
  else if(error == KNOWN_ERROR_1)
     // handle known error 1
  else if(error == KNOWN_ERROR_2)
     // handle known error 2
  else
     throw Errors.forCode(error).exception(); // or some other default
behavior

This works because we have a convention that and error is something that
prevented your getting the response so the default handling case is sane
and forward compatible. It is tempting to use the error code to convey
information in the success case. For example we could use error codes to
encode whether quotas were enforced, whether the request was served out of
cache, whether the stock market is up today, or whatever. The problem is
that since these are not errors as far as the client is concerned it should
not throw an exception but process the response, but now we created an
explicit requirement that that error be handled explicitly since it is
different. I really think that this kind of information is not an error, it
is just information, and if we want it in the response we should do the
right thing and add a new field to the response.

I think you saw the Samza bug that was literally an example of this
happening and leading to an infinite retry loop.

Further more I really want to emphasize that hitting your quota in the
design that Adi has proposed is actually not an error condition at all. It
is totally reasonable in any bootstrap situation to intentionally want to
run at the limit the system imposes on you.

-Jay



On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 4:27 PM, Jun Rao <j...@confluent.io> wrote:

> It's probably useful for a client to know whether its requests are
> throttled or not (e.g., for monitoring and alerting). From that
> perspective, option B (delay the requests and return an error) seems
> better.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jun
>
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 3:51 PM, Aditya Auradkar <
> aaurad...@linkedin.com.invalid> wrote:
>
> > Posted a KIP for quotas in kafka.
> > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-13+-+Quotas
> >
> > Appreciate any feedback.
> >
> > Aditya
> >
>

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