Hi Till! Thanks a lot for your useful reply.
So now I get it. I should not manipulate or disturb the network buffer contents, as this will trigger other problematic behaviours. On the other hand, the price of buffering the data in my operator first and e.g. sorting them first based on some criterion, and then processing them...what is the its impact to the efficiency/effectiveness of a streaming algorithm. I mean, Flink is "pure" streaming, but not-so-pure due to the network buffers, so if I use another buffering at site in each operator, this will make my application slower and also this is not streaming, this becomes batch. Thanks in advance. Best, Max -- Sent from: http://apache-flink-user-mailing-list-archive.2336050.n4.nabble.com/