Github user fhueske commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/801#issuecomment-110511102
If you reserve 2 bytes of a long for the task id you have 6 bytes left for
the counter. This gives you 2^16 partitions, with 2^48 elements per partition.
You can also use Strings instead of longs if you are worried about the value
range.
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