Hi, There was a bug in my code, I was assigning the timestamps wrong and that is why it looked like early events where assigned processing time. Surprisingly enought my test works both ok with early events. In fact I have modified my test data generator to generate early events or late events, and both seem to work ok with my test ( https://github.com/juanrh/flink-state-eviction/blob/293fe1cf972b2e4bc6fb4e874eb8ba70c78f7894/src/main/java/com/github/juanrh/streaming/source/EventTimeDelayedElementsSource.java, https://github.com/juanrh/flink-state-eviction/blob/293fe1cf972b2e4bc6fb4e874eb8ba70c78f7894/src/test/java/com/github/juanrh/streaming/source/EventTimeDelayedElementsSourceTest.java )
Anyway, is this the expected behaviour for early events? Is Flink buffering early events until their future timestamp arrives? Thanks, Juan On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 8:31 PM, Juan Rodríguez Hortalá < juan.rodriguez.hort...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > Maybe this is already in the documentation, sorry if I'm asking something > obvious. I was thinking that if you have event time then you can also have > early events, which would be events whose extracted timestampt is in the > future. This might happen in practice for example in sensors with a skewed > clock, that assign timestamps in the future to the events. I have made a > simple test with a time window (https://github.com/juanrh/ > flink-state-eviction/commit/09c2c1fe1e6068b0703c0833b8a574313cdca5a2), > and it looks like Flink treats early events like events generated at the > current processing time. What it's the expected behaviour of Flink for > early events? > > Early events might be interesting for generating test data, if Flink was > able to buffer those early events until its actual time arrives, although I > guess implementing that would probably impact the performance in > production. But as I say, early events might happen in production because > you can have wrong clocks or wrong code in general in the devices that > generate the events. Maybe a fallback to ingestion time would make sense, > and an approximation to that might be implemented with a timestamp > extractor that overrides future timestamps with System.currenTimeMillis. > > Greetings, > > Juan >
