Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Piotr Nowojski]

Thanks for the update and write up Arvid.

Piotrek

czw., 30 lip 2020 o 11:05 Arvid Heise  napisał(a):

> Dear all,
>
> I just wanted to follow-up on this long discussion thread by announcing
> that we implemented unaligned checkpoints in Flink 1.11. If you experience
> long end-to-end checkpointing duration, you should try out unaligned
> checkpoints [1] if the following applies:
>
>- Checkpointing is not bottlenecked by I/O (to state backend). Possible
>reasons are: slow connections, rate limits, or huge operator or user
> state.
>- You can attribute the long duration to slow data flow. An operator in
>the pipeline is severely lagging behind and you can easily see it in
> Flink
>Web UI.
>- You cannot alleviate the problem by adjusting the degree of
>parallelism to the slow operator, either because of temporal spikes or
> lags
>or because you don’t control the application in a platform-as-a-service
>architecture.
>
> You can enable it in the flink-conf.yaml.
> execution.checkpointing.unaligned: true
>
> Or in your application:
> env.getCheckpointConfig().enableUnalignedCheckpoints() (Java/Scala)
> env.get_checkpoint_config().enable_unaligned_checkpoints() (Python)
>
> Note that this relatively young feature still has a couple of limitations
> that we resolve in future versions.
>
>- You cannot rescale or change the job graph when starting from an
>unaligned checkpoint; you have to take a savepoint before rescaling.
>Savepoints are always aligned, independent of the alignment setting of
>checkpoints. This feature has the highest priority and will be
> available in
>upcoming releases.
>- Flink currently does not support concurrent unaligned checkpoints.
>However, due to the more predictable and shorter checkpointing times,
>concurrent checkpoints might not be needed at all. However, savepoints
> can
>also not happen concurrently to unaligned checkpoints, so they will take
>slightly longer.
>- SourceFunctions are user-defined, run a separate thread, and output
>records under lock. When they block because of backpressure, the induced
>checkpoints cannot acquire the lock and checkpointing duration
> increases.
>We will provide SourceFunctions a way to also avoid blocking and
> implement
>it for all sources in Flink core, but because the code is ultimately
>user-defined, we have no way to guarantee non-blocking behavior.
>Nevertheless, since only sources are affected, the checkpointing
> durations
>are still much lower and most importantly do not increase with further
>shuffles. Furthermore, Flink 1.11 also provides a new way to implement
>sources (FLIP-27). This new source interface has a better threading
> model,
>such that users do not create their own threads anymore and Flink can
>guarantee non-blocking behavior for these sources.
>- Unaligned checkpoints break with an implicit guarantee in respect to
>watermarks during recovery. Currently, Flink generates the watermark as
> a
>first step of recovery instead of storing the latest watermark in the
>operators to ease rescaling. For unaligned checkpoints, this means
> that, on
>recovery, Flink generates watermarks after it restores in-flight data.
> If
>your pipeline uses an operator that applies the latest watermark on each
>record, it will produce different results than for aligned checkpoints.
> If
>your operator depends on the latest watermark being always available,
> then
>the proper solution is to store the watermark in the operator state. To
>support rescaling, watermarks should be stored per key-group in a
>union-state. This feature has a high priority.
>- Lastly, there is a conceptual weakness in unaligned checkpoints: when
>an operator produces an arbitrary amount of outputs for a single input,
>such as flatMap, all of these output records need to be stored into the
>state for the unaligned checkpoint, which may increase the state size by
>orders of magnitudes and slow down checkpointing and recovery. However,
>since flatMap only needs alignment after a shuffle and rarely produces a
>huge number of records for a single input, it’s more of a theoretic
>problem.
>
> Lastly, we also plan to improve the configurations, such that ultimately,
> unaligned checkpoints will be the default configuration.
>
>- Users will be able to configure a timeout, such that each operator
>first tries to perform an aligned checkpoint. If the timeout is
> triggered,
>it switches to an unaligned checkpoint. Since the timeout would only
>trigger in the niche use cases that unaligned checkpoints addresses, it
>would mostly perform an aligned checkpoint under no or low backpressure.
>Thus, together with the previously mentioned fixes for the limitation,
> this
>timeout would allow Flink to enable unaligned checkpoints by default.
>- Another idea is 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Arvid Heise]

Dear all,

I just wanted to follow-up on this long discussion thread by announcing
that we implemented unaligned checkpoints in Flink 1.11. If you experience
long end-to-end checkpointing duration, you should try out unaligned
checkpoints [1] if the following applies:

   - Checkpointing is not bottlenecked by I/O (to state backend). Possible
   reasons are: slow connections, rate limits, or huge operator or user state.
   - You can attribute the long duration to slow data flow. An operator in
   the pipeline is severely lagging behind and you can easily see it in Flink
   Web UI.
   - You cannot alleviate the problem by adjusting the degree of
   parallelism to the slow operator, either because of temporal spikes or lags
   or because you don’t control the application in a platform-as-a-service
   architecture.

You can enable it in the flink-conf.yaml.
execution.checkpointing.unaligned: true

Or in your application:
env.getCheckpointConfig().enableUnalignedCheckpoints() (Java/Scala)
env.get_checkpoint_config().enable_unaligned_checkpoints() (Python)

Note that this relatively young feature still has a couple of limitations
that we resolve in future versions.

   - You cannot rescale or change the job graph when starting from an
   unaligned checkpoint; you have to take a savepoint before rescaling.
   Savepoints are always aligned, independent of the alignment setting of
   checkpoints. This feature has the highest priority and will be available in
   upcoming releases.
   - Flink currently does not support concurrent unaligned checkpoints.
   However, due to the more predictable and shorter checkpointing times,
   concurrent checkpoints might not be needed at all. However, savepoints can
   also not happen concurrently to unaligned checkpoints, so they will take
   slightly longer.
   - SourceFunctions are user-defined, run a separate thread, and output
   records under lock. When they block because of backpressure, the induced
   checkpoints cannot acquire the lock and checkpointing duration increases.
   We will provide SourceFunctions a way to also avoid blocking and implement
   it for all sources in Flink core, but because the code is ultimately
   user-defined, we have no way to guarantee non-blocking behavior.
   Nevertheless, since only sources are affected, the checkpointing durations
   are still much lower and most importantly do not increase with further
   shuffles. Furthermore, Flink 1.11 also provides a new way to implement
   sources (FLIP-27). This new source interface has a better threading model,
   such that users do not create their own threads anymore and Flink can
   guarantee non-blocking behavior for these sources.
   - Unaligned checkpoints break with an implicit guarantee in respect to
   watermarks during recovery. Currently, Flink generates the watermark as a
   first step of recovery instead of storing the latest watermark in the
   operators to ease rescaling. For unaligned checkpoints, this means that, on
   recovery, Flink generates watermarks after it restores in-flight data. If
   your pipeline uses an operator that applies the latest watermark on each
   record, it will produce different results than for aligned checkpoints. If
   your operator depends on the latest watermark being always available, then
   the proper solution is to store the watermark in the operator state. To
   support rescaling, watermarks should be stored per key-group in a
   union-state. This feature has a high priority.
   - Lastly, there is a conceptual weakness in unaligned checkpoints: when
   an operator produces an arbitrary amount of outputs for a single input,
   such as flatMap, all of these output records need to be stored into the
   state for the unaligned checkpoint, which may increase the state size by
   orders of magnitudes and slow down checkpointing and recovery. However,
   since flatMap only needs alignment after a shuffle and rarely produces a
   huge number of records for a single input, it’s more of a theoretic
   problem.

Lastly, we also plan to improve the configurations, such that ultimately,
unaligned checkpoints will be the default configuration.

   - Users will be able to configure a timeout, such that each operator
   first tries to perform an aligned checkpoint. If the timeout is triggered,
   it switches to an unaligned checkpoint. Since the timeout would only
   trigger in the niche use cases that unaligned checkpoints addresses, it
   would mostly perform an aligned checkpoint under no or low backpressure.
   Thus, together with the previously mentioned fixes for the limitation, this
   timeout would allow Flink to enable unaligned checkpoints by default.
   - Another idea is to provide users to define a maximum state size for
   the in-flight data. However, it might be hard for users to configure the
   size correctly as it also requires to know how many buffers are used in the
   respective application and it might be even harder to actually use the size
  

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Thomas Weise]

Hi Arvid,

Thanks for putting together the proposal [1]

I'm planning to take a closer look in the next few days.

Has any of the work been translated to JIRAs yet and what would be the
approximate target release?

Thanks,
Thomas


[1]
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-76%3A+Unaligned+Checkpoints

On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 12:11 PM Arvid Heise  wrote:

> Sry incorrect link, please follow [1].
>
> [1]
>
> https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/flink-dev/201909.mbox/%3CCAGZNd0FgVL0oDQJHpBwJ1Ha8QevsVG0FHixdet11tLhW2p-2hg%40mail.gmail.com%3E
>
> On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 3:44 PM Arvid Heise  wrote:
>
> > FYI, we published FLIP-76 to address the issue and discussion has been
> > opened in [1].
> >
> > Looking forward to your feedback,
> >
> > Arvid
> >
> > [1]
> > https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/flink-dev/201909.mbox/browser
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 9:43 AM Yun Gao 
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >> Very thanks for the great points!
> >>
> >> For the prioritizing inputs, from another point of view, I think it
> >> might not cause other bad effects, since we do not need to totally block
> >> the channels that have seen barriers after the operator has taking
> >> snapshot. After the snapshotting, if the channels that has not seen
> >> barriers have buffers, we could first logging and processing these
> buffers
> >> and if they do not have buffers, we can still processing the buffers
> from
> >> the channels that has seen barriers. Therefore, It seems prioritizing
> >> inputs should be able to accelerate the checkpoint without other bad
> >> effects.
> >>
> >>and @zhijiangFor making the unaligned checkpoint the only mechanism
> >> for all cases, I still think we should allow a configurable timeout
> after
> >> receiving the first barrier so that the channels may get "drained"
> during
> >> the timeout, as pointed out by Stephan. With such a timeout, we are very
> >> likely not need to snapshot the input buffers, which would be very
> similar
> >> to the current aligned checkpoint mechanism.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >> Yun
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> From:zhijiang 
> >> Send Time:2019 Aug. 15 (Thu.) 02:22
> >> To:dev 
> >> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
> >>
> >> > For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
> >> > arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed
> >> state.
> >>
> >> Yes, I agree.
> >>
> >> > So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast
> >> as
> >> > possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
> >> > process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when
> it
> >> is
> >> > already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).
> >>
> >> My previous understanding of prioritizing inputs is from task processing
> >> aspect after snapshot state. If from the persisting buffers aspect, I
> think
> >> it might be up to how we implement it.
> >> If we only tag/reference which buffers in inputs be the part of state,
> >> and make the real persisting work is done in async way. That means the
> >> already tagged buffers could be processed by task w/o priority.
> >> And only after all the persisting work done, the task would report to
> >> coordinator of finished checkpoint on its side. The key point is how we
> >> implement to make task could continue processing buffers as soon as
> >> possible.
> >>
> >> Thanks for the further explannation of requirements for speeding up
> >> checkpoints in backpressure scenario. To make the savepoint finish
> quickly
> >> and then tune the setting to avoid backpressure is really a pratical
> case.
> >> I think this solution could cover this concern.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >> Zhijiang
> >> --
> >> From:Thomas Weise 
> >> Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 19:48
> >> To:dev ; zhijiang 
> >> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
> >>
> >> -->
> >>
> >> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM zhijiang
> >>  wrote:
> >>
> >> > Thanks for these great points and disccusions!
> >> >
> >> > 1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the
> >> tasks
> >> > from Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to
> >> make
> >> > sure that the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
> >> > But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as
> >> > Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more
> >> > heavy loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the
> >> tasks
> >> > in large scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval.
> >> > Furthermore it would also cause other important RPC to be executed
> >> delay to
> >> > bring potentail timeout risks.
> >> >
> >> > 2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on
> >> > first barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment
> >> combining
> >> > with

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Arvid Heise]

Sry incorrect link, please follow [1].

[1]
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/flink-dev/201909.mbox/%3CCAGZNd0FgVL0oDQJHpBwJ1Ha8QevsVG0FHixdet11tLhW2p-2hg%40mail.gmail.com%3E

On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 3:44 PM Arvid Heise  wrote:

> FYI, we published FLIP-76 to address the issue and discussion has been
> opened in [1].
>
> Looking forward to your feedback,
>
> Arvid
>
> [1]
> https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/flink-dev/201909.mbox/browser
>
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 9:43 AM Yun Gao 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> Very thanks for the great points!
>>
>> For the prioritizing inputs, from another point of view, I think it
>> might not cause other bad effects, since we do not need to totally block
>> the channels that have seen barriers after the operator has taking
>> snapshot. After the snapshotting, if the channels that has not seen
>> barriers have buffers, we could first logging and processing these buffers
>> and if they do not have buffers, we can still processing the buffers from
>> the channels that has seen barriers. Therefore, It seems prioritizing
>> inputs should be able to accelerate the checkpoint without other bad
>> effects.
>>
>>and @zhijiangFor making the unaligned checkpoint the only mechanism
>> for all cases, I still think we should allow a configurable timeout after
>> receiving the first barrier so that the channels may get "drained" during
>> the timeout, as pointed out by Stephan. With such a timeout, we are very
>> likely not need to snapshot the input buffers, which would be very similar
>> to the current aligned checkpoint mechanism.
>>
>> Best,
>> Yun
>>
>>
>> --
>> From:zhijiang 
>> Send Time:2019 Aug. 15 (Thu.) 02:22
>> To:dev 
>> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>>
>> > For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
>> > arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed
>> state.
>>
>> Yes, I agree.
>>
>> > So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast
>> as
>> > possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
>> > process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when it
>> is
>> > already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).
>>
>> My previous understanding of prioritizing inputs is from task processing
>> aspect after snapshot state. If from the persisting buffers aspect, I think
>> it might be up to how we implement it.
>> If we only tag/reference which buffers in inputs be the part of state,
>> and make the real persisting work is done in async way. That means the
>> already tagged buffers could be processed by task w/o priority.
>> And only after all the persisting work done, the task would report to
>> coordinator of finished checkpoint on its side. The key point is how we
>> implement to make task could continue processing buffers as soon as
>> possible.
>>
>> Thanks for the further explannation of requirements for speeding up
>> checkpoints in backpressure scenario. To make the savepoint finish quickly
>> and then tune the setting to avoid backpressure is really a pratical case.
>> I think this solution could cover this concern.
>>
>> Best,
>> Zhijiang
>> --
>> From:Thomas Weise 
>> Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 19:48
>> To:dev ; zhijiang 
>> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>>
>> -->
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM zhijiang
>>  wrote:
>>
>> > Thanks for these great points and disccusions!
>> >
>> > 1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the
>> tasks
>> > from Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to
>> make
>> > sure that the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
>> > But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as
>> > Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more
>> > heavy loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the
>> tasks
>> > in large scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval.
>> > Furthermore it would also cause other important RPC to be executed
>> delay to
>> > bring potentail timeout risks.
>> >
>> > 2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on
>> > first barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment
>> combining
>> > with unaligned checkpoints in flink.
>> >
>> > >  The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which
>> > already have received barriers.
>> > >  However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from
>> > which barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
>> >
>> > I think we will not have an adverse effect if not prioritizing the
>> inputs
>> > w/o barriers in this case. After sync snapshot, the task could actually
>> > process any input channels. For the input channel receiving the first
>> > barrier, we already have the obvious boundary for persisting buffers.
>>

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Arvid Heise]

FYI, we published FLIP-76 to address the issue and discussion has been
opened in [1].

Looking forward to your feedback,

Arvid

[1] https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/flink-dev/201909.mbox/browser

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 9:43 AM Yun Gao 
wrote:

> Hi,
> Very thanks for the great points!
>
> For the prioritizing inputs, from another point of view, I think it
> might not cause other bad effects, since we do not need to totally block
> the channels that have seen barriers after the operator has taking
> snapshot. After the snapshotting, if the channels that has not seen
> barriers have buffers, we could first logging and processing these buffers
> and if they do not have buffers, we can still processing the buffers from
> the channels that has seen barriers. Therefore, It seems prioritizing
> inputs should be able to accelerate the checkpoint without other bad
> effects.
>
>and @zhijiangFor making the unaligned checkpoint the only mechanism for
> all cases, I still think we should allow a configurable timeout after
> receiving the first barrier so that the channels may get "drained" during
> the timeout, as pointed out by Stephan. With such a timeout, we are very
> likely not need to snapshot the input buffers, which would be very similar
> to the current aligned checkpoint mechanism.
>
> Best,
> Yun
>
>
> --
> From:zhijiang 
> Send Time:2019 Aug. 15 (Thu.) 02:22
> To:dev 
> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>
> > For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
> > arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed
> state.
>
> Yes, I agree.
>
> > So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast as
> > possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
> > process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when it
> is
> > already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).
>
> My previous understanding of prioritizing inputs is from task processing
> aspect after snapshot state. If from the persisting buffers aspect, I think
> it might be up to how we implement it.
> If we only tag/reference which buffers in inputs be the part of state, and
> make the real persisting work is done in async way. That means the already
> tagged buffers could be processed by task w/o priority.
> And only after all the persisting work done, the task would report to
> coordinator of finished checkpoint on its side. The key point is how we
> implement to make task could continue processing buffers as soon as
> possible.
>
> Thanks for the further explannation of requirements for speeding up
> checkpoints in backpressure scenario. To make the savepoint finish quickly
> and then tune the setting to avoid backpressure is really a pratical case.
> I think this solution could cover this concern.
>
> Best,
> Zhijiang
> --
> From:Thomas Weise 
> Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 19:48
> To:dev ; zhijiang 
> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>
> -->
>
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM zhijiang
>  wrote:
>
> > Thanks for these great points and disccusions!
> >
> > 1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the
> tasks
> > from Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to
> make
> > sure that the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
> > But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as
> > Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more
> > heavy loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the
> tasks
> > in large scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval.
> > Furthermore it would also cause other important RPC to be executed delay
> to
> > bring potentail timeout risks.
> >
> > 2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on
> > first barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment combining
> > with unaligned checkpoints in flink.
> >
> > >  The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which
> > already have received barriers.
> > >  However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from
> > which barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
> >
> > I think we will not have an adverse effect if not prioritizing the inputs
> > w/o barriers in this case. After sync snapshot, the task could actually
> > process any input channels. For the input channel receiving the first
> > barrier, we already have the obvious boundary for persisting buffers. For
> > other channels w/o barriers we could persist the following buffers for
> > these channels until barrier arrives in network. Because based on the
> > credit based flow control, the barrier does not need credit to transport,
> > then as long as the sender overtakes the barrier accross the output
> queue,
> > the network stack would transport this barrier immed

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Yun Gao]

Hi,
Very thanks for the great points!

For the prioritizing inputs, from another point of view, I think it might 
not cause other bad effects, since we do not need to totally block the channels 
that have seen barriers after the operator has taking snapshot. After the 
snapshotting, if the channels that has not seen barriers have buffers, we could 
first logging and processing these buffers and if they do not have buffers, we 
can still processing the buffers from the channels that has seen barriers. 
Therefore, It seems prioritizing inputs should be able to accelerate the 
checkpoint without other bad effects.

   and @zhijiangFor making the unaligned checkpoint the only mechanism for all 
cases, I still think we should allow a configurable timeout after receiving the 
first barrier so that the channels may get "drained" during the timeout, as 
pointed out by Stephan. With such a timeout, we are very likely not need to 
snapshot the input buffers, which would be very similar to the current aligned 
checkpoint mechanism. 

Best, 
Yun


--
From:zhijiang 
Send Time:2019 Aug. 15 (Thu.) 02:22
To:dev 
Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

> For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
> arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed state.

Yes, I agree.

> So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast as
> possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
> process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when it is
> already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).

My previous understanding of prioritizing inputs is from task processing aspect 
after snapshot state. If from the persisting buffers aspect, I think it might 
be up to how we implement it.
If we only tag/reference which buffers in inputs be the part of state, and make 
the real persisting work is done in async way. That means the already tagged 
buffers could be processed by task w/o priority.
And only after all the persisting work done, the task would report to 
coordinator of finished checkpoint on its side. The key point is how we 
implement to make task could continue processing buffers as soon as possible.

Thanks for the further explannation of requirements for speeding up checkpoints 
in backpressure scenario. To make the savepoint finish quickly and then tune 
the setting to avoid backpressure is really a pratical case. I think this 
solution could cover this concern.

Best,
Zhijiang
--
From:Thomas Weise 
Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 19:48
To:dev ; zhijiang 
Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

-->

On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM zhijiang
 wrote:

> Thanks for these great points and disccusions!
>
> 1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the tasks
> from Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to make
> sure that the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
> But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as
> Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more
> heavy loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the tasks
> in large scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval.
> Furthermore it would also cause other important RPC to be executed delay to
> bring potentail timeout risks.
>
> 2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on
> first barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment combining
> with unaligned checkpoints in flink.
>
> >  The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which
> already have received barriers.
> >  However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from
> which barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
>
> I think we will not have an adverse effect if not prioritizing the inputs
> w/o barriers in this case. After sync snapshot, the task could actually
> process any input channels. For the input channel receiving the first
> barrier, we already have the obvious boundary for persisting buffers. For
> other channels w/o barriers we could persist the following buffers for
> these channels until barrier arrives in network. Because based on the
> credit based flow control, the barrier does not need credit to transport,
> then as long as the sender overtakes the barrier accross the output queue,
> the network stack would transport this barrier immediately no matter with
> the inputs condition on receiver side. So there is no requirements to
> consume accumulated buffers in these channels for higher priority. If so it
> seems that we will not waste any CPU cycles as Piotr concerns before.
>

I'm not sure I follow this. For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed state.
So wouldn't it be important to 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Stephan Ewen]

@Thomas just to double check:

  - parallelism and configuration changes should be well possible on
unaligned checkpoints
  - changes in state types and JobGraph structure would be tricky, and
changing the on-the-wire types would not be possible.

On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 7:48 PM Thomas Weise  wrote:

> -->
>
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM zhijiang
>  wrote:
>
> > Thanks for these great points and disccusions!
> >
> > 1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the
> tasks
> > from Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to
> make
> > sure that the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
> > But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as
> > Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more
> > heavy loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the
> tasks
> > in large scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval.
> > Furthermore it would also cause other important RPC to be executed delay
> to
> > bring potentail timeout risks.
> >
> > 2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on
> > first barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment combining
> > with unaligned checkpoints in flink.
> >
> > >  The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which
> > already have received barriers.
> > >  However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from
> > which barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
> >
> > I think we will not have an adverse effect if not prioritizing the inputs
> > w/o barriers in this case. After sync snapshot, the task could actually
> > process any input channels. For the input channel receiving the first
> > barrier, we already have the obvious boundary for persisting buffers. For
> > other channels w/o barriers we could persist the following buffers for
> > these channels until barrier arrives in network. Because based on the
> > credit based flow control, the barrier does not need credit to transport,
> > then as long as the sender overtakes the barrier accross the output
> queue,
> > the network stack would transport this barrier immediately no matter with
> > the inputs condition on receiver side. So there is no requirements to
> > consume accumulated buffers in these channels for higher priority. If so
> it
> > seems that we will not waste any CPU cycles as Piotr concerns before.
> >
>
> I'm not sure I follow this. For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
> arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed state.
> So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast as
> possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
> process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when it is
> already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).
>
>
> >
> > 3. Suppose the unaligned checkpoints performing well in practice, is it
> > possible to make it as the only mechanism for handling all the cases? I
> > mean for the non-backpressure scenario, there are less buffers even empty
> > in input/output queue, then the "overtaking barrier--> trigger snapshot
> on
> > first barrier--> persist buffers" might still work well. So we do not
> need
> > to maintain two suits of mechanisms finally.
> >
> > 4.  The initial motivation of this dicussion is for checkpoint timeout in
> > backpressure scenario. If we adjust the default timeout to a very big
> > value, that means the checkpoint would never timeout and we only need to
> > wait it finish. Then are there still any other problems/concerns if
> > checkpoint takes long time to finish? Althougn we already knew some
> issues
> > before, it is better to gather more user feedbacks to confirm which
> aspects
> > could be solved in this feature design. E.g. the sink commit delay might
> > not be coverd by unaligned solution.
> >
>
> Checkpoints taking too long is the concern that sparks this discussion
> (timeout is just a symptom). The slowness issue also applies to the
> savepoint use case. We would need to be able to take a savepoint fast in
> order to roll forward a fix that can alleviate the backpressure (like
> changing parallelism or making a different configuration change).
>
>
> >
> > Best,
> > Zhijiang
> > --
> > From:Stephan Ewen 
> > Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 17:43
> > To:dev 
> > Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
> >
> > Quick note: The current implementation is
> >
> > Align -> Forward -> Sync Snapshot Part (-> Async Snapshot Part)
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 5:21 PM Piotr Nowojski 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > > Thanks for the great ideas so far.
> > >
> > > +1
> > >
> > > Regarding other things raised, I mostly agree with Stephan.
> > >
> > > I like the idea of simultaneously starting the checkpoint everywhere
> via
> > > RPC call (especially in cases where Tasks are busy doing some
> s

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[zhijiang]

> For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
> arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed state.

Yes, I agree.

> So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast as
> possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
> process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when it is
> already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).

My previous understanding of prioritizing inputs is from task processing aspect 
after snapshot state. If from the persisting buffers aspect, I think it might 
be up to how we implement it.
If we only tag/reference which buffers in inputs be the part of state, and make 
the real persisting work is done in async way. That means the already tagged 
buffers could be processed by task w/o priority.
And only after all the persisting work done, the task would report to 
coordinator of finished checkpoint on its side. The key point is how we 
implement to make task could continue processing buffers as soon as possible.

Thanks for the further explannation of requirements for speeding up checkpoints 
in backpressure scenario. To make the savepoint finish quickly and then tune 
the setting to avoid backpressure is really a pratical case. I think this 
solution could cover this concern.

Best,
Zhijiang
--
From:Thomas Weise 
Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 19:48
To:dev ; zhijiang 
Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

-->

On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM zhijiang
 wrote:

> Thanks for these great points and disccusions!
>
> 1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the tasks
> from Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to make
> sure that the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
> But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as
> Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more
> heavy loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the tasks
> in large scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval.
> Furthermore it would also cause other important RPC to be executed delay to
> bring potentail timeout risks.
>
> 2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on
> first barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment combining
> with unaligned checkpoints in flink.
>
> >  The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which
> already have received barriers.
> >  However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from
> which barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
>
> I think we will not have an adverse effect if not prioritizing the inputs
> w/o barriers in this case. After sync snapshot, the task could actually
> process any input channels. For the input channel receiving the first
> barrier, we already have the obvious boundary for persisting buffers. For
> other channels w/o barriers we could persist the following buffers for
> these channels until barrier arrives in network. Because based on the
> credit based flow control, the barrier does not need credit to transport,
> then as long as the sender overtakes the barrier accross the output queue,
> the network stack would transport this barrier immediately no matter with
> the inputs condition on receiver side. So there is no requirements to
> consume accumulated buffers in these channels for higher priority. If so it
> seems that we will not waste any CPU cycles as Piotr concerns before.
>

I'm not sure I follow this. For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed state.
So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast as
possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when it is
already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).


>
> 3. Suppose the unaligned checkpoints performing well in practice, is it
> possible to make it as the only mechanism for handling all the cases? I
> mean for the non-backpressure scenario, there are less buffers even empty
> in input/output queue, then the "overtaking barrier--> trigger snapshot on
> first barrier--> persist buffers" might still work well. So we do not need
> to maintain two suits of mechanisms finally.
>
> 4.  The initial motivation of this dicussion is for checkpoint timeout in
> backpressure scenario. If we adjust the default timeout to a very big
> value, that means the checkpoint would never timeout and we only need to
> wait it finish. Then are there still any other problems/concerns if
> checkpoint takes long time to finish? Althougn we already knew some issues
> before, it is better to gather more user feedbacks to confirm which aspects
> could be solved in this feature design. E.g. the sink commit delay might
> not be coverd by unaligned solution

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Thomas Weise]

-->

On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM zhijiang
 wrote:

> Thanks for these great points and disccusions!
>
> 1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the tasks
> from Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to make
> sure that the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
> But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as
> Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more
> heavy loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the tasks
> in large scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval.
> Furthermore it would also cause other important RPC to be executed delay to
> bring potentail timeout risks.
>
> 2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on
> first barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment combining
> with unaligned checkpoints in flink.
>
> >  The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which
> already have received barriers.
> >  However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from
> which barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
>
> I think we will not have an adverse effect if not prioritizing the inputs
> w/o barriers in this case. After sync snapshot, the task could actually
> process any input channels. For the input channel receiving the first
> barrier, we already have the obvious boundary for persisting buffers. For
> other channels w/o barriers we could persist the following buffers for
> these channels until barrier arrives in network. Because based on the
> credit based flow control, the barrier does not need credit to transport,
> then as long as the sender overtakes the barrier accross the output queue,
> the network stack would transport this barrier immediately no matter with
> the inputs condition on receiver side. So there is no requirements to
> consume accumulated buffers in these channels for higher priority. If so it
> seems that we will not waste any CPU cycles as Piotr concerns before.
>

I'm not sure I follow this. For the checkpoint to complete, any buffer that
arrived prior to the barrier would be to be part of the checkpointed state.
So wouldn't it be important to finish persisting these buffers as fast as
possible by prioritizing respective inputs? The task won't be able to
process records from the inputs that have seen the barrier fast when it is
already backpressured (or causing the backpressure).


>
> 3. Suppose the unaligned checkpoints performing well in practice, is it
> possible to make it as the only mechanism for handling all the cases? I
> mean for the non-backpressure scenario, there are less buffers even empty
> in input/output queue, then the "overtaking barrier--> trigger snapshot on
> first barrier--> persist buffers" might still work well. So we do not need
> to maintain two suits of mechanisms finally.
>
> 4.  The initial motivation of this dicussion is for checkpoint timeout in
> backpressure scenario. If we adjust the default timeout to a very big
> value, that means the checkpoint would never timeout and we only need to
> wait it finish. Then are there still any other problems/concerns if
> checkpoint takes long time to finish? Althougn we already knew some issues
> before, it is better to gather more user feedbacks to confirm which aspects
> could be solved in this feature design. E.g. the sink commit delay might
> not be coverd by unaligned solution.
>

Checkpoints taking too long is the concern that sparks this discussion
(timeout is just a symptom). The slowness issue also applies to the
savepoint use case. We would need to be able to take a savepoint fast in
order to roll forward a fix that can alleviate the backpressure (like
changing parallelism or making a different configuration change).


>
> Best,
> Zhijiang
> --
> From:Stephan Ewen 
> Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 17:43
> To:dev 
> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>
> Quick note: The current implementation is
>
> Align -> Forward -> Sync Snapshot Part (-> Async Snapshot Part)
>
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 5:21 PM Piotr Nowojski 
> wrote:
>
> > > Thanks for the great ideas so far.
> >
> > +1
> >
> > Regarding other things raised, I mostly agree with Stephan.
> >
> > I like the idea of simultaneously starting the checkpoint everywhere via
> > RPC call (especially in cases where Tasks are busy doing some synchronous
> > operations for example for tens of milliseconds. In that case every
> network
> > exchange adds tens of milliseconds of delay in propagating the
> checkpoint).
> > However I agree that this might be a premature optimisation assuming the
> > current state of our code (we already have checkpoint barriers).
> >
> > However I like the idea of switching from:
> >
> > 1. A -> S -> F (Align -> snapshot -> forward markers)
> >
> > To
> >
> > 2. S -> F -> L (Snapshot -> forward markers -> log pending 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[zhijiang]

Thanks for these great points and disccusions!

1. Considering the way of triggering checkpoint RPC calls to all the tasks from 
Chandy Lamport, it combines two different mechanisms together to make sure that 
the trigger could be fast in different scenarios.
But in flink world it might be not very worth trying that way, just as 
Stephan's analysis for it. Another concern is that it might bring more heavy 
loads for JobMaster broadcasting this checkpoint RPC to all the tasks in large 
scale job, especially for the very short checkpoint interval. Furthermore it 
would also cause other important RPC to be executed delay to bring potentail 
timeout risks.

2. I agree with the idea of drawing on the way "take state snapshot on first 
barrier" from Chandy Lamport instead of barrier alignment combining with 
unaligned checkpoints in flink.

>  The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which already 
>  have received barriers.
>  However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from which 
>  barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.

I think we will not have an adverse effect if not prioritizing the inputs w/o 
barriers in this case. After sync snapshot, the task could actually process any 
input channels. For the input channel receiving the first barrier, we already 
have the obvious boundary for persisting buffers. For other channels w/o 
barriers we could persist the following buffers for these channels until 
barrier arrives in network. Because based on the credit based flow control, the 
barrier does not need credit to transport, then as long as the sender overtakes 
the barrier accross the output queue, the network stack would transport this 
barrier immediately no matter with the inputs condition on receiver side. So 
there is no requirements to consume accumulated buffers in these channels for 
higher priority. If so it seems that we will not waste any CPU cycles as Piotr 
concerns before.

3. Suppose the unaligned checkpoints performing well in practice, is it 
possible to make it as the only mechanism for handling all the cases? I mean 
for the non-backpressure scenario, there are less buffers even empty in 
input/output queue, then the "overtaking barrier--> trigger snapshot on first 
barrier--> persist buffers" might still work well. So we do not need to 
maintain two suits of mechanisms finally.

4.  The initial motivation of this dicussion is for checkpoint timeout in 
backpressure scenario. If we adjust the default timeout to a very big value, 
that means the checkpoint would never timeout and we only need to wait it 
finish. Then are there still any other problems/concerns if checkpoint takes 
long time to finish? Althougn we already knew some issues before, it is better 
to gather more user feedbacks to confirm which aspects could be solved in this 
feature design. E.g. the sink commit delay might not be coverd by unaligned 
solution.

Best,
Zhijiang
--
From:Stephan Ewen 
Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 17:43
To:dev 
Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

Quick note: The current implementation is

Align -> Forward -> Sync Snapshot Part (-> Async Snapshot Part)

On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 5:21 PM Piotr Nowojski  wrote:

> > Thanks for the great ideas so far.
>
> +1
>
> Regarding other things raised, I mostly agree with Stephan.
>
> I like the idea of simultaneously starting the checkpoint everywhere via
> RPC call (especially in cases where Tasks are busy doing some synchronous
> operations for example for tens of milliseconds. In that case every network
> exchange adds tens of milliseconds of delay in propagating the checkpoint).
> However I agree that this might be a premature optimisation assuming the
> current state of our code (we already have checkpoint barriers).
>
> However I like the idea of switching from:
>
> 1. A -> S -> F (Align -> snapshot -> forward markers)
>
> To
>
> 2. S -> F -> L (Snapshot -> forward markers -> log pending channels)
>
> Or even to
>
> 6. F -> S -> L (Forward markers -> snapshot -> log pending channels)
>
> It feels to me like this would decouple propagation of checkpoints from
> costs of synchronous snapshots and waiting for all of the checkpoint
> barriers to arrive (even if they will overtake in-flight records, this
> might take some time).
>
> > What I like about the Chandy Lamport approach (2.) initiated from
> sources is that:
> >   - Snapshotting imposes no modification to normal processing.
>
> Yes, I agree that would be nice. Currently, during the alignment and
> blocking of the input channels, we might be wasting CPU cycles of up stream
> tasks. If we succeed in designing new checkpointing mechanism to not
> disrupt/block regular data processing (% the extra IO cost for logging the
> in-flight records), that would be a huge improvement.
>
> Piotrek
>
> > On 14 Aug 2019, at 14:56, Paris Carbone  wrote:
> >
> > Sure I see. In case

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Stephan Ewen]

Quick note: The current implementation is

Align -> Forward -> Sync Snapshot Part (-> Async Snapshot Part)

On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 5:21 PM Piotr Nowojski  wrote:

> > Thanks for the great ideas so far.
>
> +1
>
> Regarding other things raised, I mostly agree with Stephan.
>
> I like the idea of simultaneously starting the checkpoint everywhere via
> RPC call (especially in cases where Tasks are busy doing some synchronous
> operations for example for tens of milliseconds. In that case every network
> exchange adds tens of milliseconds of delay in propagating the checkpoint).
> However I agree that this might be a premature optimisation assuming the
> current state of our code (we already have checkpoint barriers).
>
> However I like the idea of switching from:
>
> 1. A -> S -> F (Align -> snapshot -> forward markers)
>
> To
>
> 2. S -> F -> L (Snapshot -> forward markers -> log pending channels)
>
> Or even to
>
> 6. F -> S -> L (Forward markers -> snapshot -> log pending channels)
>
> It feels to me like this would decouple propagation of checkpoints from
> costs of synchronous snapshots and waiting for all of the checkpoint
> barriers to arrive (even if they will overtake in-flight records, this
> might take some time).
>
> > What I like about the Chandy Lamport approach (2.) initiated from
> sources is that:
> >   - Snapshotting imposes no modification to normal processing.
>
> Yes, I agree that would be nice. Currently, during the alignment and
> blocking of the input channels, we might be wasting CPU cycles of up stream
> tasks. If we succeed in designing new checkpointing mechanism to not
> disrupt/block regular data processing (% the extra IO cost for logging the
> in-flight records), that would be a huge improvement.
>
> Piotrek
>
> > On 14 Aug 2019, at 14:56, Paris Carbone  wrote:
> >
> > Sure I see. In cases when no periodic aligned snapshots are employed
> this is the only option.
> >
> > Two things that were not highlighted enough so far on the proposed
> protocol (included my mails):
> >   - The Recovery/Reconfiguration strategy should strictly prioritise
> processing logged events before entering normal task input operation.
> Otherwise causality can be violated. This also means dataflow recovery will
> be expected to be slower to the one employed on an aligned snapshot.
> >   - Same as with state capture, markers should be forwarded upon
> first marker received on input. No later than that. Otherwise we have
> duplicate side effects.
> >
> > Thanks for the great ideas so far.
> >
> > Paris
> >
> >> On 14 Aug 2019, at 14:33, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
> >>
> >> Scaling with unaligned checkpoints might be a necessity.
> >>
> >> Let's assume the job failed due to a lost TaskManager, but no new
> >> TaskManager becomes available.
> >> In that case we need to scale down based on the latest complete
> checkpoint,
> >> because we cannot produce a new checkpoint.
> >>
> >>
> >> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 2:05 PM Paris Carbone 
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> +1 I think we are on the same page Stephan.
> >>>
> >>> Rescaling on unaligned checkpoint sounds challenging and a bit
> >>> unnecessary. No?
> >>> Why not sticking to aligned snapshots for live
> reconfiguration/rescaling?
> >>> It’s a pretty rare operation and it would simplify things by a lot.
> >>> Everything can be “staged” upon alignment including replacing channels
> and
> >>> tasks.
> >>>
> >>> -Paris
> >>>
>  On 14 Aug 2019, at 13:39, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
> 
>  Hi all!
> 
>  Yes, the first proposal of "unaligend checkpoints" (probably two years
> >>> back
>  now) drew a major inspiration from Chandy Lamport, as did actually the
>  original checkpointing algorithm.
> 
>  "Logging data between first and last barrier" versus "barrier jumping
> >>> over
>  buffer and storing those buffers" is pretty close same.
>  However, there are a few nice benefits of the proposal of unaligned
>  checkpoints over Chandy-Lamport.
> 
>  *## Benefits of Unaligned Checkpoints*
> 
>  (1) It is very similar to the original algorithm (can be seen an an
>  optional feature purely in the network stack) and thus can share
> lot's of
>  code paths.
> 
>  (2) Less data stored. If we make the "jump over buffers" part timeout
> >>> based
>  (for example barrier overtakes buffers if not flushed within 10ms)
> then
>  checkpoints are in the common case of flowing pipelines aligned
> without
>  in-flight data. Only back pressured cases store some in-flight data,
> >>> which
>  means we don't regress in the common case and only fix the back
> pressure
>  case.
> 
>  (3) Faster checkpoints. Chandy Lamport still waits for all barriers to
>  arrive naturally, logging on the way. If data processing is slow, this
> >>> can
>  still take quite a while.
> 
>  ==> I think both these points are strong reasons to not change the
>  mechanism away from "trigger 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Piotr Nowojski]

> Thanks for the great ideas so far.

+1

Regarding other things raised, I mostly agree with Stephan. 

I like the idea of simultaneously starting the checkpoint everywhere via RPC 
call (especially in cases where Tasks are busy doing some synchronous 
operations for example for tens of milliseconds. In that case every network 
exchange adds tens of milliseconds of delay in propagating the checkpoint). 
However I agree that this might be a premature optimisation assuming the 
current state of our code (we already have checkpoint barriers).

However I like the idea of switching from:

1. A -> S -> F (Align -> snapshot -> forward markers)

To

2. S -> F -> L (Snapshot -> forward markers -> log pending channels)

Or even to

6. F -> S -> L (Forward markers -> snapshot -> log pending channels)

It feels to me like this would decouple propagation of checkpoints from costs 
of synchronous snapshots and waiting for all of the checkpoint barriers to 
arrive (even if they will overtake in-flight records, this might take some 
time).

> What I like about the Chandy Lamport approach (2.) initiated from sources is 
> that:
>   - Snapshotting imposes no modification to normal processing. 

Yes, I agree that would be nice. Currently, during the alignment and blocking 
of the input channels, we might be wasting CPU cycles of up stream tasks. If we 
succeed in designing new checkpointing mechanism to not disrupt/block regular 
data processing (% the extra IO cost for logging the in-flight records), that 
would be a huge improvement.

Piotrek

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 14:56, Paris Carbone  wrote:
> 
> Sure I see. In cases when no periodic aligned snapshots are employed this is 
> the only option.
> 
> Two things that were not highlighted enough so far on the proposed protocol 
> (included my mails):
>   - The Recovery/Reconfiguration strategy should strictly prioritise 
> processing logged events before entering normal task input operation. 
> Otherwise causality can be violated. This also means dataflow recovery will 
> be expected to be slower to the one employed on an aligned snapshot.
>   - Same as with state capture, markers should be forwarded upon first 
> marker received on input. No later than that. Otherwise we have duplicate 
> side effects.
> 
> Thanks for the great ideas so far.
> 
> Paris
> 
>> On 14 Aug 2019, at 14:33, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
>> 
>> Scaling with unaligned checkpoints might be a necessity.
>> 
>> Let's assume the job failed due to a lost TaskManager, but no new
>> TaskManager becomes available.
>> In that case we need to scale down based on the latest complete checkpoint,
>> because we cannot produce a new checkpoint.
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 2:05 PM Paris Carbone 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> +1 I think we are on the same page Stephan.
>>> 
>>> Rescaling on unaligned checkpoint sounds challenging and a bit
>>> unnecessary. No?
>>> Why not sticking to aligned snapshots for live reconfiguration/rescaling?
>>> It’s a pretty rare operation and it would simplify things by a lot.
>>> Everything can be “staged” upon alignment including replacing channels and
>>> tasks.
>>> 
>>> -Paris
>>> 
 On 14 Aug 2019, at 13:39, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
 
 Hi all!
 
 Yes, the first proposal of "unaligend checkpoints" (probably two years
>>> back
 now) drew a major inspiration from Chandy Lamport, as did actually the
 original checkpointing algorithm.
 
 "Logging data between first and last barrier" versus "barrier jumping
>>> over
 buffer and storing those buffers" is pretty close same.
 However, there are a few nice benefits of the proposal of unaligned
 checkpoints over Chandy-Lamport.
 
 *## Benefits of Unaligned Checkpoints*
 
 (1) It is very similar to the original algorithm (can be seen an an
 optional feature purely in the network stack) and thus can share lot's of
 code paths.
 
 (2) Less data stored. If we make the "jump over buffers" part timeout
>>> based
 (for example barrier overtakes buffers if not flushed within 10ms) then
 checkpoints are in the common case of flowing pipelines aligned without
 in-flight data. Only back pressured cases store some in-flight data,
>>> which
 means we don't regress in the common case and only fix the back pressure
 case.
 
 (3) Faster checkpoints. Chandy Lamport still waits for all barriers to
 arrive naturally, logging on the way. If data processing is slow, this
>>> can
 still take quite a while.
 
 ==> I think both these points are strong reasons to not change the
 mechanism away from "trigger sources" and start with CL-style "trigger
>>> all".
 
 
 *## Possible ways to combine Chandy Lamport and Unaligned Checkpoints*
 
 We can think about something like "take state snapshot on first barrier"
 and then store buffers until the other barriers arrive. Inside the
>>> network
 stack, barriers could still overtake

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Paris Carbone]

Sure I see. In cases when no periodic aligned snapshots are employed this is 
the only option.

Two things that were not highlighted enough so far on the proposed protocol 
(included my mails):
- The Recovery/Reconfiguration strategy should strictly prioritise 
processing logged events before entering normal task input operation. Otherwise 
causality can be violated. This also means dataflow recovery will be expected 
to be slower to the one employed on an aligned snapshot.
- Same as with state capture, markers should be forwarded upon first 
marker received on input. No later than that. Otherwise we have duplicate side 
effects.

Thanks for the great ideas so far.

Paris

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 14:33, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
> 
> Scaling with unaligned checkpoints might be a necessity.
> 
> Let's assume the job failed due to a lost TaskManager, but no new
> TaskManager becomes available.
> In that case we need to scale down based on the latest complete checkpoint,
> because we cannot produce a new checkpoint.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 2:05 PM Paris Carbone 
> wrote:
> 
>> +1 I think we are on the same page Stephan.
>> 
>> Rescaling on unaligned checkpoint sounds challenging and a bit
>> unnecessary. No?
>> Why not sticking to aligned snapshots for live reconfiguration/rescaling?
>> It’s a pretty rare operation and it would simplify things by a lot.
>> Everything can be “staged” upon alignment including replacing channels and
>> tasks.
>> 
>> -Paris
>> 
>>> On 14 Aug 2019, at 13:39, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi all!
>>> 
>>> Yes, the first proposal of "unaligend checkpoints" (probably two years
>> back
>>> now) drew a major inspiration from Chandy Lamport, as did actually the
>>> original checkpointing algorithm.
>>> 
>>> "Logging data between first and last barrier" versus "barrier jumping
>> over
>>> buffer and storing those buffers" is pretty close same.
>>> However, there are a few nice benefits of the proposal of unaligned
>>> checkpoints over Chandy-Lamport.
>>> 
>>> *## Benefits of Unaligned Checkpoints*
>>> 
>>> (1) It is very similar to the original algorithm (can be seen an an
>>> optional feature purely in the network stack) and thus can share lot's of
>>> code paths.
>>> 
>>> (2) Less data stored. If we make the "jump over buffers" part timeout
>> based
>>> (for example barrier overtakes buffers if not flushed within 10ms) then
>>> checkpoints are in the common case of flowing pipelines aligned without
>>> in-flight data. Only back pressured cases store some in-flight data,
>> which
>>> means we don't regress in the common case and only fix the back pressure
>>> case.
>>> 
>>> (3) Faster checkpoints. Chandy Lamport still waits for all barriers to
>>> arrive naturally, logging on the way. If data processing is slow, this
>> can
>>> still take quite a while.
>>> 
>>> ==> I think both these points are strong reasons to not change the
>>> mechanism away from "trigger sources" and start with CL-style "trigger
>> all".
>>> 
>>> 
>>> *## Possible ways to combine Chandy Lamport and Unaligned Checkpoints*
>>> 
>>> We can think about something like "take state snapshot on first barrier"
>>> and then store buffers until the other barriers arrive. Inside the
>> network
>>> stack, barriers could still overtake and persist buffers.
>>> The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which already
>>> have received barriers.
>>> However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from which
>>> barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> *## Concerning upgrades*
>>> 
>>> I think it is a fair restriction to say that upgrades need to happen on
>>> aligned checkpoints. It is a rare enough operation.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> *## Concerning re-scaling (changing parallelism)*
>>> 
>>> We need to support that on unaligned checkpoints as well. There are
>> several
>>> feature proposals about automatic scaling, especially down scaling in
>> case
>>> of missing resources. The last snapshot might be a regular checkpoint, so
>>> all checkpoints need to support rescaling.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> *## Concerning end-to-end checkpoint duration and "trigger sources"
>> versus
>>> "trigger all"*
>>> 
>>> I think for the end-to-end checkpoint duration, an "overtake buffers"
>>> approach yields faster checkpoints, as mentioned above (Chandy Lamport
>>> logging still needs to wait for barrier to flow).
>>> 
>>> I don't see the benefit of a "trigger all tasks via RPC concurrently"
>>> approach. Bear in mind that it is still a globally coordinated approach
>> and
>>> you need to wait for the global checkpoint to complete before committing
>>> any side effects.
>>> I believe that the checkpoint time is more determined by the state
>>> checkpoint writing, and the global coordination and metadata commit, than
>>> by the difference in alignment time between "trigger from source and jump
>>> over buffers" versus "trigger all tasks concurrently".
>>> 
>>> Trying to optimize a few tens of mil

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Stephan Ewen]

Scaling with unaligned checkpoints might be a necessity.

Let's assume the job failed due to a lost TaskManager, but no new
TaskManager becomes available.
In that case we need to scale down based on the latest complete checkpoint,
because we cannot produce a new checkpoint.


On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 2:05 PM Paris Carbone 
wrote:

> +1 I think we are on the same page Stephan.
>
> Rescaling on unaligned checkpoint sounds challenging and a bit
> unnecessary. No?
> Why not sticking to aligned snapshots for live reconfiguration/rescaling?
> It’s a pretty rare operation and it would simplify things by a lot.
> Everything can be “staged” upon alignment including replacing channels and
> tasks.
>
> -Paris
>
> > On 14 Aug 2019, at 13:39, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
> >
> > Hi all!
> >
> > Yes, the first proposal of "unaligend checkpoints" (probably two years
> back
> > now) drew a major inspiration from Chandy Lamport, as did actually the
> > original checkpointing algorithm.
> >
> > "Logging data between first and last barrier" versus "barrier jumping
> over
> > buffer and storing those buffers" is pretty close same.
> > However, there are a few nice benefits of the proposal of unaligned
> > checkpoints over Chandy-Lamport.
> >
> > *## Benefits of Unaligned Checkpoints*
> >
> > (1) It is very similar to the original algorithm (can be seen an an
> > optional feature purely in the network stack) and thus can share lot's of
> > code paths.
> >
> > (2) Less data stored. If we make the "jump over buffers" part timeout
> based
> > (for example barrier overtakes buffers if not flushed within 10ms) then
> > checkpoints are in the common case of flowing pipelines aligned without
> > in-flight data. Only back pressured cases store some in-flight data,
> which
> > means we don't regress in the common case and only fix the back pressure
> > case.
> >
> > (3) Faster checkpoints. Chandy Lamport still waits for all barriers to
> > arrive naturally, logging on the way. If data processing is slow, this
> can
> > still take quite a while.
> >
> > ==> I think both these points are strong reasons to not change the
> > mechanism away from "trigger sources" and start with CL-style "trigger
> all".
> >
> >
> > *## Possible ways to combine Chandy Lamport and Unaligned Checkpoints*
> >
> > We can think about something like "take state snapshot on first barrier"
> > and then store buffers until the other barriers arrive. Inside the
> network
> > stack, barriers could still overtake and persist buffers.
> > The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which already
> > have received barriers.
> > However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from which
> > barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
> >
> >
> > *## Concerning upgrades*
> >
> > I think it is a fair restriction to say that upgrades need to happen on
> > aligned checkpoints. It is a rare enough operation.
> >
> >
> > *## Concerning re-scaling (changing parallelism)*
> >
> > We need to support that on unaligned checkpoints as well. There are
> several
> > feature proposals about automatic scaling, especially down scaling in
> case
> > of missing resources. The last snapshot might be a regular checkpoint, so
> > all checkpoints need to support rescaling.
> >
> >
> > *## Concerning end-to-end checkpoint duration and "trigger sources"
> versus
> > "trigger all"*
> >
> > I think for the end-to-end checkpoint duration, an "overtake buffers"
> > approach yields faster checkpoints, as mentioned above (Chandy Lamport
> > logging still needs to wait for barrier to flow).
> >
> > I don't see the benefit of a "trigger all tasks via RPC concurrently"
> > approach. Bear in mind that it is still a globally coordinated approach
> and
> > you need to wait for the global checkpoint to complete before committing
> > any side effects.
> > I believe that the checkpoint time is more determined by the state
> > checkpoint writing, and the global coordination and metadata commit, than
> > by the difference in alignment time between "trigger from source and jump
> > over buffers" versus "trigger all tasks concurrently".
> >
> > Trying to optimize a few tens of milliseconds out of the network stack
> > sends (and changing the overall checkpointing approach completely for
> that)
> > while staying with a globally coordinated checkpoint will send us down a
> > path to a dead end.
> >
> > To really bring task persistence latency down to 10s of milliseconds (so
> we
> > can frequently commit in sinks), we need to take an approach without any
> > global coordination. Tasks need to establish a persistent recovery point
> > individually and at their own discretion, only then can it be frequent
> > enough. To get there, they would need to decouple themselves from the
> > predecessor and successor tasks (via something like persistent channels).
> > This is a different discussion, though, somewhat orthogonal to this one
> > here.
> >
> > Best,
> > Stephan
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Au

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Paris Carbone]

+1 I think we are on the same page Stephan.

Rescaling on unaligned checkpoint sounds challenging and a bit unnecessary. No?
Why not sticking to aligned snapshots for live reconfiguration/rescaling? It’s 
a pretty rare operation and it would simplify things by a lot. Everything can 
be “staged” upon alignment including replacing channels and tasks.

-Paris

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 13:39, Stephan Ewen  wrote:
> 
> Hi all!
> 
> Yes, the first proposal of "unaligend checkpoints" (probably two years back
> now) drew a major inspiration from Chandy Lamport, as did actually the
> original checkpointing algorithm.
> 
> "Logging data between first and last barrier" versus "barrier jumping over
> buffer and storing those buffers" is pretty close same.
> However, there are a few nice benefits of the proposal of unaligned
> checkpoints over Chandy-Lamport.
> 
> *## Benefits of Unaligned Checkpoints*
> 
> (1) It is very similar to the original algorithm (can be seen an an
> optional feature purely in the network stack) and thus can share lot's of
> code paths.
> 
> (2) Less data stored. If we make the "jump over buffers" part timeout based
> (for example barrier overtakes buffers if not flushed within 10ms) then
> checkpoints are in the common case of flowing pipelines aligned without
> in-flight data. Only back pressured cases store some in-flight data, which
> means we don't regress in the common case and only fix the back pressure
> case.
> 
> (3) Faster checkpoints. Chandy Lamport still waits for all barriers to
> arrive naturally, logging on the way. If data processing is slow, this can
> still take quite a while.
> 
> ==> I think both these points are strong reasons to not change the
> mechanism away from "trigger sources" and start with CL-style "trigger all".
> 
> 
> *## Possible ways to combine Chandy Lamport and Unaligned Checkpoints*
> 
> We can think about something like "take state snapshot on first barrier"
> and then store buffers until the other barriers arrive. Inside the network
> stack, barriers could still overtake and persist buffers.
> The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which already
> have received barriers.
> However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from which
> barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.
> 
> 
> *## Concerning upgrades*
> 
> I think it is a fair restriction to say that upgrades need to happen on
> aligned checkpoints. It is a rare enough operation.
> 
> 
> *## Concerning re-scaling (changing parallelism)*
> 
> We need to support that on unaligned checkpoints as well. There are several
> feature proposals about automatic scaling, especially down scaling in case
> of missing resources. The last snapshot might be a regular checkpoint, so
> all checkpoints need to support rescaling.
> 
> 
> *## Concerning end-to-end checkpoint duration and "trigger sources" versus
> "trigger all"*
> 
> I think for the end-to-end checkpoint duration, an "overtake buffers"
> approach yields faster checkpoints, as mentioned above (Chandy Lamport
> logging still needs to wait for barrier to flow).
> 
> I don't see the benefit of a "trigger all tasks via RPC concurrently"
> approach. Bear in mind that it is still a globally coordinated approach and
> you need to wait for the global checkpoint to complete before committing
> any side effects.
> I believe that the checkpoint time is more determined by the state
> checkpoint writing, and the global coordination and metadata commit, than
> by the difference in alignment time between "trigger from source and jump
> over buffers" versus "trigger all tasks concurrently".
> 
> Trying to optimize a few tens of milliseconds out of the network stack
> sends (and changing the overall checkpointing approach completely for that)
> while staying with a globally coordinated checkpoint will send us down a
> path to a dead end.
> 
> To really bring task persistence latency down to 10s of milliseconds (so we
> can frequently commit in sinks), we need to take an approach without any
> global coordination. Tasks need to establish a persistent recovery point
> individually and at their own discretion, only then can it be frequent
> enough. To get there, they would need to decouple themselves from the
> predecessor and successor tasks (via something like persistent channels).
> This is a different discussion, though, somewhat orthogonal to this one
> here.
> 
> Best,
> Stephan
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 12:37 PM Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
> 
>> Hi again,
>> 
>> Zhu Zhu let me think about this more. Maybe as Paris is writing, we do not
>> need to block any channels at all, at least assuming credit base flow
>> control. Regarding what should happen with the following checkpoint is
>> another question. Also, should we support concurrent checkpoints and
>> subsuming checkpoints as we do now? Maybe not…
>> 
>> Paris
>> 
>> Re
>> I. 2. a) and b) - yes, this would have to be taken into an account
>> I. 2. c) and IV. 2. - withou

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Paris Carbone]

Thanks for the responses. Starts getting a bit more clear for everyone now. 

@Zhuzhu overlapping unaligned snapshots should be aborted/avoided imho.
@Piotr point II, it was a little too quickly written, sorry about that.
Simply put the two following approaches are equivalent for a valid checkpoint. 

1. A -> S -> F
2. S -> F -> L

Other variants introduce issues. For example:

3. L -> S (duplicate side effects)
4. L -> A -> S  (again duplicates)
5. S -> L -> A  (valid but unnecessary channel blocking)

Abbreviations
—

S: Capture state
L: Log pending channels
F: Forward Marker
A: Align markers by blocking non-pending channels

What I like about the Chandy Lamport approach (2.) initiated from sources is 
that:
- Snapshotting imposes no modification to normal processing. 
- Can exploit pipeline parallelism if started from the sources, 
following the natural processing order without concurrent operations to 
backends (think of long pipelines, e.g., 30 operators with high parallelism, 
e.g. 100)

I would love to see a design doc soon and discuss ideas there instead. Might 
not seem like it but I don’t fancy writing long and boring emails. :)

-Paris

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 13:10, Yun Gao  wrote:
> 
>Hi,
>   Very thanks for sharing the thoughts on the unaligned checkpoint !
>
>  Another question regarding I 2.C (Performance) by Paris is that do we 
> always snapshot and broadcast the marks once the task receives the first mark 
> from JM o? If so, then we will always need to snapshot all the records before 
> the next barriers in all the input channels . However, I thinks users may be 
> able to tolerate a fixed interval for the checkpointing, and we may postpone 
> the snapshot and broadcast till a configurable fixed time passed. With such a 
> postpone, jobs without back pressure could still avoid most IO operations and 
> storage overhead, and jobs with back pressure could also be able to finish 
> the checkpoint in a fixed interval with less IO overhead.  
> 
> Best, 
> Yun
> 
> --
> From:Piotr Nowojski 
> Send Time:2019 Aug. 14 (Wed.) 18:38
> To:Paris Carbone 
> Cc:dev ; zhijiang ; Nico 
> Kruber 
> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
> 
> Hi again,
> 
> Zhu Zhu let me think about this more. Maybe as Paris is writing, we do not 
> need to block any channels at all, at least assuming credit base flow 
> control. Regarding what should happen with the following checkpoint is 
> another question. Also, should we support concurrent checkpoints and 
> subsuming checkpoints as we do now? Maybe not…
> 
> Paris
> 
> Re 
> I. 2. a) and b) - yes, this would have to be taken into an account
> I. 2. c) and IV. 2. - without those, end to end checkpoint time will probably 
> be longer than it could be. It might affect external systems. For example 
> Kafka, which automatically time outs lingering transactions, and for us, the 
> transaction time is equal to the time between two checkpoints.
> 
> II 1. - I’m confused. To make things straight. Flink is currently 
> snapshotting once it receives all of the checkpoint barriers from all of the 
> input channels and only then it broadcasts the checkpoint barrier down the 
> stream. And this is correct from exactly-once perspective. 
> 
> As far as I understand, your proposal based on Chandy Lamport algorithm, is 
> snapshotting the state of the operator on the first checkpoint barrier, which 
> also looks correct to me.
> 
> III. 1. As I responded to Zhu Zhu, let me think a bit more about this.
> 
> V. Yes, we still need aligned checkpoints, as they are easier for state 
> migration and upgrades. 
> 
> Piotrek
> 
> > On 14 Aug 2019, at 11:22, Paris Carbone  wrote:
> > 
> > Now I see a little more clearly what you have in mind. Thanks for the 
> > explanation!
> > There are a few intermixed concepts here, some how to do with correctness 
> > some with performance.
> > Before delving deeper I will just enumerate a few things to make myself a 
> > little more helpful if I can.
> > 
> > I. Initiation
> > -
> > 
> > 1. RPC to sources only is a less intrusive way to initiate snapshots since 
> > you utilize better pipeline parallelism (only a small subset of tasks is 
> > running progressively the protocol at a time, if snapshotting is async the 
> > overall overhead might not even be observable).
> > 
> > 2. If we really want an RPC to all initiation take notice of the following 
> > implications:
> >  
> >  a. (correctness) RPC calls are not guaranteed to arrive in every task 
> > before a marker from a preceding task.
> > 
> >  b. (correctness) Either the RPC call OR the first arriving marker should 
> > initiate the algorithm. Whichever comes first. If you only do it per RPC 
> > call then you capture a "late" state that includes side effects of already 
> > logged events.
> > 
> >  c. (performance) Lots of IO will be invoked at the same time on the

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Stephan Ewen]

Hi all!

Yes, the first proposal of "unaligend checkpoints" (probably two years back
now) drew a major inspiration from Chandy Lamport, as did actually the
original checkpointing algorithm.

"Logging data between first and last barrier" versus "barrier jumping over
buffer and storing those buffers" is pretty close same.
However, there are a few nice benefits of the proposal of unaligned
checkpoints over Chandy-Lamport.

*## Benefits of Unaligned Checkpoints*

(1) It is very similar to the original algorithm (can be seen an an
optional feature purely in the network stack) and thus can share lot's of
code paths.

(2) Less data stored. If we make the "jump over buffers" part timeout based
(for example barrier overtakes buffers if not flushed within 10ms) then
checkpoints are in the common case of flowing pipelines aligned without
in-flight data. Only back pressured cases store some in-flight data, which
means we don't regress in the common case and only fix the back pressure
case.

(3) Faster checkpoints. Chandy Lamport still waits for all barriers to
arrive naturally, logging on the way. If data processing is slow, this can
still take quite a while.

==> I think both these points are strong reasons to not change the
mechanism away from "trigger sources" and start with CL-style "trigger all".


*## Possible ways to combine Chandy Lamport and Unaligned Checkpoints*

We can think about something like "take state snapshot on first barrier"
and then store buffers until the other barriers arrive. Inside the network
stack, barriers could still overtake and persist buffers.
The benefit would be less latency increase in the channels which already
have received barriers.
However, as mentioned before, not prioritizing the inputs from which
barriers are still missing can also have an adverse effect.


*## Concerning upgrades*

I think it is a fair restriction to say that upgrades need to happen on
aligned checkpoints. It is a rare enough operation.


*## Concerning re-scaling (changing parallelism)*

We need to support that on unaligned checkpoints as well. There are several
feature proposals about automatic scaling, especially down scaling in case
of missing resources. The last snapshot might be a regular checkpoint, so
all checkpoints need to support rescaling.


*## Concerning end-to-end checkpoint duration and "trigger sources" versus
"trigger all"*

I think for the end-to-end checkpoint duration, an "overtake buffers"
approach yields faster checkpoints, as mentioned above (Chandy Lamport
logging still needs to wait for barrier to flow).

I don't see the benefit of a "trigger all tasks via RPC concurrently"
approach. Bear in mind that it is still a globally coordinated approach and
you need to wait for the global checkpoint to complete before committing
any side effects.
I believe that the checkpoint time is more determined by the state
checkpoint writing, and the global coordination and metadata commit, than
by the difference in alignment time between "trigger from source and jump
over buffers" versus "trigger all tasks concurrently".

Trying to optimize a few tens of milliseconds out of the network stack
sends (and changing the overall checkpointing approach completely for that)
while staying with a globally coordinated checkpoint will send us down a
path to a dead end.

To really bring task persistence latency down to 10s of milliseconds (so we
can frequently commit in sinks), we need to take an approach without any
global coordination. Tasks need to establish a persistent recovery point
individually and at their own discretion, only then can it be frequent
enough. To get there, they would need to decouple themselves from the
predecessor and successor tasks (via something like persistent channels).
This is a different discussion, though, somewhat orthogonal to this one
here.

Best,
Stephan


On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 12:37 PM Piotr Nowojski  wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> Zhu Zhu let me think about this more. Maybe as Paris is writing, we do not
> need to block any channels at all, at least assuming credit base flow
> control. Regarding what should happen with the following checkpoint is
> another question. Also, should we support concurrent checkpoints and
> subsuming checkpoints as we do now? Maybe not…
>
> Paris
>
> Re
> I. 2. a) and b) - yes, this would have to be taken into an account
> I. 2. c) and IV. 2. - without those, end to end checkpoint time will
> probably be longer than it could be. It might affect external systems. For
> example Kafka, which automatically time outs lingering transactions, and
> for us, the transaction time is equal to the time between two checkpoints.
>
> II 1. - I’m confused. To make things straight. Flink is currently
> snapshotting once it receives all of the checkpoint barriers from all of
> the input channels and only then it broadcasts the checkpoint barrier down
> the stream. And this is correct from exactly-once perspective.
>
> As far as I understand, your proposal based on Chandy

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Yun Gao]

   Hi,
  Very thanks for sharing the thoughts on the unaligned checkpoint !
  Another question regarding I 2.C (Performance) by Paris is that do we 
always snapshot and broadcast the marks once the task receives the first mark 
from JM o? If so, then we will always need to snapshot all the records before 
the next barriers in all the input channels . However, I thinks users may be 
able to tolerate a fixed interval for the checkpointing, and we may postpone 
the snapshot and broadcast till a configurable fixed time passed. With such a 
postpone, jobs without back pressure could still avoid most IO operations and 
storage overhead, and jobs with back pressure could also be able to finish the 
checkpoint in a fixed interval with less IO overhead.  

Best, 
Yun


--
From:Piotr Nowojski 
Send Time:2019 Aug. 14 (Wed.) 18:38
To:Paris Carbone 
Cc:dev ; zhijiang ; Nico 
Kruber 
Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

Hi again,

Zhu Zhu let me think about this more. Maybe as Paris is writing, we do not need 
to block any channels at all, at least assuming credit base flow control. 
Regarding what should happen with the following checkpoint is another question. 
Also, should we support concurrent checkpoints and subsuming checkpoints as we 
do now? Maybe not…

Paris

Re 
I. 2. a) and b) - yes, this would have to be taken into an account
I. 2. c) and IV. 2. - without those, end to end checkpoint time will probably 
be longer than it could be. It might affect external systems. For example 
Kafka, which automatically time outs lingering transactions, and for us, the 
transaction time is equal to the time between two checkpoints.

II 1. - I’m confused. To make things straight. Flink is currently snapshotting 
once it receives all of the checkpoint barriers from all of the input channels 
and only then it broadcasts the checkpoint barrier down the stream. And this is 
correct from exactly-once perspective. 

As far as I understand, your proposal based on Chandy Lamport algorithm, is 
snapshotting the state of the operator on the first checkpoint barrier, which 
also looks correct to me.

III. 1. As I responded to Zhu Zhu, let me think a bit more about this.

V. Yes, we still need aligned checkpoints, as they are easier for state 
migration and upgrades. 

Piotrek

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 11:22, Paris Carbone  wrote:
> 
> Now I see a little more clearly what you have in mind. Thanks for the 
> explanation!
> There are a few intermixed concepts here, some how to do with correctness 
> some with performance.
> Before delving deeper I will just enumerate a few things to make myself a 
> little more helpful if I can.
> 
> I. Initiation
> -
> 
> 1. RPC to sources only is a less intrusive way to initiate snapshots since 
> you utilize better pipeline parallelism (only a small subset of tasks is 
> running progressively the protocol at a time, if snapshotting is async the 
> overall overhead might not even be observable).
> 
> 2. If we really want an RPC to all initiation take notice of the following 
> implications:
>  
>  a. (correctness) RPC calls are not guaranteed to arrive in every task before 
> a marker from a preceding task.
> 
>  b. (correctness) Either the RPC call OR the first arriving marker should 
> initiate the algorithm. Whichever comes first. If you only do it per RPC call 
> then you capture a "late" state that includes side effects of already logged 
> events.
> 
>  c. (performance) Lots of IO will be invoked at the same time on the backend 
> store from all tasks. This might lead to high congestion in async snapshots.
> 
> II. Capturing State First
> -
> 
> 1. (correctness) Capturing state at the last marker sounds incorrect to me 
> (state contains side effects of already logged events based on the proposed 
> scheme). This results into duplicate processing. No?
> 
> III. Channel Blocking / "Alignment"
> ---
> 
> 1. (performance?) What is the added benefit? We dont want a "complete" 
> transactional snapshot, async snapshots are purely for failure-recovery. 
> Thus, I dont see why this needs to be imposed at the expense of 
> performance/throughput. With the proposed scheme the whole dataflow anyway 
> enters snapshotting/logging mode so tasks more or less snapshot concurrently. 
> 
> IV Marker Bypassing
> ---
> 
> 1. (correctness) This leads to equivalent in-flight snapshots so with some 
> quick thinking  correct. I will try to model this later and get back to you 
> in case I find something wrong.
> 
> 2. (performance) It also sounds like a meaningful optimisation! I like 
> thinking of this as a push-based snapshot. i.e., the producing task somehow 
> triggers forward a consumer/channel to capture its state. By example consider 
> T1 -> |marker t1| -> T2. 
> 
> V. Usage of "Async" Snapshots
> -
> 
> 1. Do you see this a

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Piotr Nowojski]

Hi again,

Zhu Zhu let me think about this more. Maybe as Paris is writing, we do not need 
to block any channels at all, at least assuming credit base flow control. 
Regarding what should happen with the following checkpoint is another question. 
Also, should we support concurrent checkpoints and subsuming checkpoints as we 
do now? Maybe not…

Paris

Re 
I. 2. a) and b) - yes, this would have to be taken into an account
I. 2. c) and IV. 2. - without those, end to end checkpoint time will probably 
be longer than it could be. It might affect external systems. For example 
Kafka, which automatically time outs lingering transactions, and for us, the 
transaction time is equal to the time between two checkpoints.

II 1. - I’m confused. To make things straight. Flink is currently snapshotting 
once it receives all of the checkpoint barriers from all of the input channels 
and only then it broadcasts the checkpoint barrier down the stream. And this is 
correct from exactly-once perspective. 

As far as I understand, your proposal based on Chandy Lamport algorithm, is 
snapshotting the state of the operator on the first checkpoint barrier, which 
also looks correct to me.

III. 1. As I responded to Zhu Zhu, let me think a bit more about this.

V. Yes, we still need aligned checkpoints, as they are easier for state 
migration and upgrades. 

Piotrek

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 11:22, Paris Carbone  wrote:
> 
> Now I see a little more clearly what you have in mind. Thanks for the 
> explanation!
> There are a few intermixed concepts here, some how to do with correctness 
> some with performance.
> Before delving deeper I will just enumerate a few things to make myself a 
> little more helpful if I can.
> 
> I. Initiation
> -
> 
> 1. RPC to sources only is a less intrusive way to initiate snapshots since 
> you utilize better pipeline parallelism (only a small subset of tasks is 
> running progressively the protocol at a time, if snapshotting is async the 
> overall overhead might not even be observable).
> 
> 2. If we really want an RPC to all initiation take notice of the following 
> implications:
>   
>   a. (correctness) RPC calls are not guaranteed to arrive in every task 
> before a marker from a preceding task.
> 
>   b. (correctness) Either the RPC call OR the first arriving marker 
> should initiate the algorithm. Whichever comes first. If you only do it per 
> RPC call then you capture a "late" state that includes side effects of 
> already logged events.
> 
>   c. (performance) Lots of IO will be invoked at the same time on the 
> backend store from all tasks. This might lead to high congestion in async 
> snapshots.
> 
> II. Capturing State First
> -
> 
> 1. (correctness) Capturing state at the last marker sounds incorrect to me 
> (state contains side effects of already logged events based on the proposed 
> scheme). This results into duplicate processing. No?
> 
> III. Channel Blocking / "Alignment"
> ---
> 
> 1. (performance?) What is the added benefit? We dont want a "complete" 
> transactional snapshot, async snapshots are purely for failure-recovery. 
> Thus, I dont see why this needs to be imposed at the expense of 
> performance/throughput. With the proposed scheme the whole dataflow anyway 
> enters snapshotting/logging mode so tasks more or less snapshot concurrently. 
> 
> IV Marker Bypassing
> ---
> 
> 1. (correctness) This leads to equivalent in-flight snapshots so with some 
> quick thinking  correct. I will try to model this later and get back to you 
> in case I find something wrong.
> 
> 2. (performance) It also sounds like a meaningful optimisation! I like 
> thinking of this as a push-based snapshot. i.e., the producing task somehow 
> triggers forward a consumer/channel to capture its state. By example consider 
> T1 -> |marker t1| -> T2. 
> 
> V. Usage of "Async" Snapshots
> -
> 
> 1. Do you see this as a full replacement of "full" aligned 
> snapshots/savepoints? In my view async shanpshots will be needed from time to 
> time but not as frequently. Yet, it seems like a valid approach solely for 
> failure-recovery on the same configuration. Here's why:
> 
>   a. With original snapshotting there is a strong duality between 
>   a stream input (offsets) and committed side effects (internal states 
> and external commits to transactional sinks). While in the async version, 
> there are uncommitted operations (inflight records). Thus, you cannot use 
> these snapshots for e.g., submitting sql queries with snapshot isolation. 
> Also, the original snapshotting gives a lot of potential for flink to make 
> proper transactional commits externally.
> 
>   b. Reconfiguration is very tricky, you probably know that better. 
> Inflight channel state is no longer valid in a new configuration (i.e., new 
> dataflow graph, new operators, updated operator logic, different

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Paris Carbone]

Now I see a little more clearly what you have in mind. Thanks for the 
explanation!
There are a few intermixed concepts here, some how to do with correctness some 
with performance.
Before delving deeper I will just enumerate a few things to make myself a 
little more helpful if I can.

I. Initiation
-

1. RPC to sources only is a less intrusive way to initiate snapshots since you 
utilize better pipeline parallelism (only a small subset of tasks is running 
progressively the protocol at a time, if snapshotting is async the overall 
overhead might not even be observable).

2. If we really want an RPC to all initiation take notice of the following 
implications:

a. (correctness) RPC calls are not guaranteed to arrive in every task 
before a marker from a preceding task.

b. (correctness) Either the RPC call OR the first arriving marker 
should initiate the algorithm. Whichever comes first. If you only do it per RPC 
call then you capture a "late" state that includes side effects of already 
logged events.

c. (performance) Lots of IO will be invoked at the same time on the 
backend store from all tasks. This might lead to high congestion in async 
snapshots.

II. Capturing State First
-

1. (correctness) Capturing state at the last marker sounds incorrect to me 
(state contains side effects of already logged events based on the proposed 
scheme). This results into duplicate processing. No?

III. Channel Blocking / "Alignment"
---

1. (performance?) What is the added benefit? We dont want a "complete" 
transactional snapshot, async snapshots are purely for failure-recovery. Thus, 
I dont see why this needs to be imposed at the expense of 
performance/throughput. With the proposed scheme the whole dataflow anyway 
enters snapshotting/logging mode so tasks more or less snapshot concurrently. 

IV Marker Bypassing
---

1. (correctness) This leads to equivalent in-flight snapshots so with some 
quick thinking  correct. I will try to model this later and get back to you in 
case I find something wrong.

2. (performance) It also sounds like a meaningful optimisation! I like thinking 
of this as a push-based snapshot. i.e., the producing task somehow triggers 
forward a consumer/channel to capture its state. By example consider T1 -> 
|marker t1| -> T2. 

V. Usage of "Async" Snapshots
-

1. Do you see this as a full replacement of "full" aligned 
snapshots/savepoints? In my view async shanpshots will be needed from time to 
time but not as frequently. Yet, it seems like a valid approach solely for 
failure-recovery on the same configuration. Here's why:

a. With original snapshotting there is a strong duality between 
a stream input (offsets) and committed side effects (internal states 
and external commits to transactional sinks). While in the async version, there 
are uncommitted operations (inflight records). Thus, you cannot use these 
snapshots for e.g., submitting sql queries with snapshot isolation. Also, the 
original snapshotting gives a lot of potential for flink to make proper 
transactional commits externally.

b. Reconfiguration is very tricky, you probably know that better. 
Inflight channel state is no longer valid in a new configuration (i.e., new 
dataflow graph, new operators, updated operator logic, different channels, 
different parallelism)

2. Async snapshots can also be potentially useful for monitoring the general 
health of a dataflow since they can be analyzed by the task manager about the 
general performance of a job graph and spot bottlenecks for example.

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 09:08, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Thomas: 
> There are no Jira tickets yet (or maybe there is something very old 
> somewhere). First we want to discuss it, next present FLIP and at last create 
> tickets :)
> 
>> if I understand correctly, then the proposal is to not block any
>> input channel at all, but only log data from the backpressured channel (and
>> make it part of the snapshot) until the barrier arrives
> 
> I would guess that it would be better to block the reads, unless we can 
> already process the records from the blocked channel…
> 
> Paris:
> 
> Thanks for the explanation Paris. I’m starting to understand this more and I 
> like the idea of snapshotting the state of an operator before receiving all 
> of the checkpoint barriers - this would allow more things to happen at the 
> same time instead of sequentially. As Zhijiang has pointed out there are some 
> things not considered in your proposal: overtaking output buffers, but maybe 
> those things could be incorporated together.
> 
> Another thing is that from the wiki description I understood that the initial 
> checkpointing is not initialised by any checkpoint barrier, but by an 
> independent call/message from the Observer. I haven’t played with this idea a 
> lot, but I had 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Zhu Zhu]

Thanks Piotr and Zhijiang for sharing the thoughts on unaligned
checkpointing and the barrier overtaking.

I have a question about 2.d) in Piotr's last mail that states "the Task
first has to process the buffered data after that it can unblock the reads
from the channels".
Does this mean that we do not want checkpoint 2 to happen if the data
before checkpoint 1 barriers are not fully processed, as the barriers of
checkpoint 2 can be blocked?
If so, the checkpointing may get blocked once the job is overloaded.
If not, a overloaded job may lead to a larger and larger checkpoint.

And I agree a slot with point 4 in Piotr's last mail and think it's
necessary for a CP1 snapshotted task to process CP1 buffered data before
all CP1 barriers are are received in this task.
Otherwise it might be a processing performance regression compared to
current exactly-once checkpointing.

Thanks,
Zhu Zhu

Piotr Nowojski  于2019年8月14日周三 下午3:08写道：

> Hi,
>
> Thomas:
> There are no Jira tickets yet (or maybe there is something very old
> somewhere). First we want to discuss it, next present FLIP and at last
> create tickets :)
>
> > if I understand correctly, then the proposal is to not block any
> > input channel at all, but only log data from the backpressured channel
> (and
> > make it part of the snapshot) until the barrier arrives
>
> I would guess that it would be better to block the reads, unless we can
> already process the records from the blocked channel…
>
> Paris:
>
> Thanks for the explanation Paris. I’m starting to understand this more and
> I like the idea of snapshotting the state of an operator before receiving
> all of the checkpoint barriers - this would allow more things to happen at
> the same time instead of sequentially. As Zhijiang has pointed out there
> are some things not considered in your proposal: overtaking output buffers,
> but maybe those things could be incorporated together.
>
> Another thing is that from the wiki description I understood that the
> initial checkpointing is not initialised by any checkpoint barrier, but by
> an independent call/message from the Observer. I haven’t played with this
> idea a lot, but I had some discussion with Nico and it seems that it might
> work:
>
> 1. JobManager sends and RPC “start checkpoint” to all tasks
> 2. Task (with two input channels l1 and l2) upon receiving RPC from 1.,
> takes a snapshot of it's state and:
>   a) broadcast checkpoint barrier down the stream to all channels (let’s
> ignore for a moment potential for this barrier to overtake the buffer
> output data)
>   b) for any input channel for which it hasn’t yet received checkpoint
> barrier, the data are being added to the checkpoint
>   c) once a channel (for example l1) receives a checkpoint barrier, the
> Task blocks reads from that channel (?)
>   d) after all remaining channels (l2) receive checkpoint barriers, the
> Task  first has to process the buffered data after that it can unblock the
> reads from the channels
>
> Checkpoint barriers do not cascade/flow through different tasks here.
> Checkpoint barrier emitted from Task1, reaches only the immediate
> downstream Tasks. Thanks to this setup, total checkpointing time is not sum
> of checkpointing times of all Tasks one by one, but more or less max of the
> slowest Tasks. Right?
>
> Couple of intriguing thoughts are:
>  3. checkpoint barriers overtaking the output buffers
>  4. can we keep processing some data (in order to not waste CPU cycles)
> after we have taking the snapshot of the Task. I think we could.
>
> Piotrek
>
> > On 14 Aug 2019, at 06:00, Thomas Weise  wrote:
> >
> > Great discussion! I'm excited that this is already under consideration!
> Are
> > there any JIRAs or other traces of discussion to follow?
> >
> > Paris, if I understand correctly, then the proposal is to not block any
> > input channel at all, but only log data from the backpressured channel
> (and
> > make it part of the snapshot) until the barrier arrives? This is
> > intriguing. But probably there is also a benefit of to not continue
> reading
> > I1 since that could speed up retrieval from I2. Also, if the user code is
> > the cause of backpressure, this would avoid pumping more data into the
> > process function.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Thomas
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 8:02 AM zhijiang  .invalid>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Paris,
> >>
> >> Thanks for the detailed sharing. And I think it is very similar with the
> >> way of overtaking we proposed before.
> >>
> >> There are some tiny difference:
> >> The way of overtaking might need to snapshot all the input/output
> queues.
> >> Chandy Lamport seems only need to snaphost (n-1) input channels after
> the
> >> first barrier arrives, which might reduce the state sizea bit. But
> normally
> >> there should be less buffers for the first input channel with barrier.
> >> The output barrier still follows with regular data stream in Chandy
> >> Lamport, the same way as current flink. For overtaking way, we ne

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Piotr Nowojski]

Hi,

Thomas: 
There are no Jira tickets yet (or maybe there is something very old somewhere). 
First we want to discuss it, next present FLIP and at last create tickets :)

> if I understand correctly, then the proposal is to not block any
> input channel at all, but only log data from the backpressured channel (and
> make it part of the snapshot) until the barrier arrives

I would guess that it would be better to block the reads, unless we can already 
process the records from the blocked channel…

Paris:

Thanks for the explanation Paris. I’m starting to understand this more and I 
like the idea of snapshotting the state of an operator before receiving all of 
the checkpoint barriers - this would allow more things to happen at the same 
time instead of sequentially. As Zhijiang has pointed out there are some things 
not considered in your proposal: overtaking output buffers, but maybe those 
things could be incorporated together.

Another thing is that from the wiki description I understood that the initial 
checkpointing is not initialised by any checkpoint barrier, but by an 
independent call/message from the Observer. I haven’t played with this idea a 
lot, but I had some discussion with Nico and it seems that it might work:

1. JobManager sends and RPC “start checkpoint” to all tasks
2. Task (with two input channels l1 and l2) upon receiving RPC from 1., takes a 
snapshot of it's state and:
  a) broadcast checkpoint barrier down the stream to all channels (let’s ignore 
for a moment potential for this barrier to overtake the buffer output data)
  b) for any input channel for which it hasn’t yet received checkpoint barrier, 
the data are being added to the checkpoint
  c) once a channel (for example l1) receives a checkpoint barrier, the Task 
blocks reads from that channel (?)
  d) after all remaining channels (l2) receive checkpoint barriers, the Task  
first has to process the buffered data after that it can unblock the reads from 
the channels

Checkpoint barriers do not cascade/flow through different tasks here. 
Checkpoint barrier emitted from Task1, reaches only the immediate downstream 
Tasks. Thanks to this setup, total checkpointing time is not sum of 
checkpointing times of all Tasks one by one, but more or less max of the 
slowest Tasks. Right?

Couple of intriguing thoughts are:
 3. checkpoint barriers overtaking the output buffers
 4. can we keep processing some data (in order to not waste CPU cycles) after 
we have taking the snapshot of the Task. I think we could.

Piotrek

> On 14 Aug 2019, at 06:00, Thomas Weise  wrote:
> 
> Great discussion! I'm excited that this is already under consideration! Are
> there any JIRAs or other traces of discussion to follow?
> 
> Paris, if I understand correctly, then the proposal is to not block any
> input channel at all, but only log data from the backpressured channel (and
> make it part of the snapshot) until the barrier arrives? This is
> intriguing. But probably there is also a benefit of to not continue reading
> I1 since that could speed up retrieval from I2. Also, if the user code is
> the cause of backpressure, this would avoid pumping more data into the
> process function.
> 
> Thanks,
> Thomas
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 8:02 AM zhijiang 
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Paris,
>> 
>> Thanks for the detailed sharing. And I think it is very similar with the
>> way of overtaking we proposed before.
>> 
>> There are some tiny difference:
>> The way of overtaking might need to snapshot all the input/output queues.
>> Chandy Lamport seems only need to snaphost (n-1) input channels after the
>> first barrier arrives, which might reduce the state sizea bit. But normally
>> there should be less buffers for the first input channel with barrier.
>> The output barrier still follows with regular data stream in Chandy
>> Lamport, the same way as current flink. For overtaking way, we need to pay
>> extra efforts to make barrier transport firstly before outque queue on
>> upstream side, and change the way of barrier alignment based on receiving
>> instead of current reading on downstream side.
>> In the backpressure caused by data skew, the first barrier in almost empty
>> input channel should arrive much eariler than the last heavy load input
>> channel, so the Chandy Lamport could benefit well. But for the case of all
>> balanced heavy load input channels, I mean the first arrived barrier might
>> still take much time, then the overtaking way could still fit well to speed
>> up checkpoint.
>> Anyway, your proposed suggestion is helpful on my side, especially
>> considering some implementation details .
>> 
>> Best,
>> Zhijiang
>> --
>> From:Paris Carbone 
>> Send Time:2019年8月13日(星期二) 14:03
>> To:dev 
>> Cc:zhijiang 
>> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>> 
>> yes! It’s quite similar I think.  Though mind that the devil is in the
>> details, i.e., the temporal order actions are taken.
>> 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[zhijiang]

Hi Thomas,

There are no Jira tickets or discussions at the moment. If there are any 
updates I would ping you.

I agree that there is a benefit to firstly read other channels without barrier 
in high priority, otherwise it seems
waste cpu resource to migrate blocked buffers to another cached queue. Actually 
we ever implemented 
this improvement in Alibaba's private branch and it was running long time in 
real prodcution. It indeeds
speed up barrier alignment a bit if the blocked input channels have some 
buffers.

Best,
Zhijiang
--
From:Thomas Weise 
Send Time:2019年8月14日(星期三) 06:00
To:dev ; zhijiang 
Cc:Paris Carbone 
Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

Great discussion! I'm excited that this is already under consideration! Are
there any JIRAs or other traces of discussion to follow?

Paris, if I understand correctly, then the proposal is to not block any
input channel at all, but only log data from the backpressured channel (and
make it part of the snapshot) until the barrier arrives? This is
intriguing. But probably there is also a benefit of to not continue reading
I1 since that could speed up retrieval from I2. Also, if the user code is
the cause of backpressure, this would avoid pumping more data into the
process function.

Thanks,
Thomas


On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 8:02 AM zhijiang 
wrote:

> Hi Paris,
>
> Thanks for the detailed sharing. And I think it is very similar with the
> way of overtaking we proposed before.
>
> There are some tiny difference:
> The way of overtaking might need to snapshot all the input/output queues.
> Chandy Lamport seems only need to snaphost (n-1) input channels after the
> first barrier arrives, which might reduce the state sizea bit. But normally
> there should be less buffers for the first input channel with barrier.
> The output barrier still follows with regular data stream in Chandy
> Lamport, the same way as current flink. For overtaking way, we need to pay
> extra efforts to make barrier transport firstly before outque queue on
> upstream side, and change the way of barrier alignment based on receiving
> instead of current reading on downstream side.
> In the backpressure caused by data skew, the first barrier in almost empty
> input channel should arrive much eariler than the last heavy load input
> channel, so the Chandy Lamport could benefit well. But for the case of all
> balanced heavy load input channels, I mean the first arrived barrier might
> still take much time, then the overtaking way could still fit well to speed
> up checkpoint.
> Anyway, your proposed suggestion is helpful on my side, especially
> considering some implementation details .
>
> Best,
> Zhijiang
> --
> From:Paris Carbone 
> Send Time:2019年8月13日(星期二) 14:03
> To:dev 
> Cc:zhijiang 
> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>
> yes! It’s quite similar I think.  Though mind that the devil is in the
> details, i.e., the temporal order actions are taken.
>
> To clarify, let us say you have a task T with two input channels I1 and I2.
> The Chandy Lamport execution flow is the following:
>
> 1) T receives barrier from  I1 and...
> 2)  ...the following three actions happen atomically
>  I )  T snapshots its state T*
>  II)  T forwards marker to its outputs
>  III) T starts logging all events of I2 (only) into a buffer M*
> - Also notice here that T does NOT block I1 as it does in aligned
> snapshots -
> 3) Eventually T receives barrier from I2 and stops recording events. Its
> asynchronously captured snapshot is now complete: {T*,M*}.
> Upon recovery all messages of M* should be replayed in FIFO order.
>
> With this approach alignment does not create a deadlock situation since
> anyway 2.II happens asynchronously and messages can be logged as well
> asynchronously during the process of the snapshot. If there is
> back-pressure in a pipeline the cause is most probably not this algorithm.
>
> Back to your observation, the answer : yes and no.  In your network model,
> I can see the logic of “logging” and “committing” a final snapshot being
> provided by the channel implementation. However, do mind that the first
> barrier always needs to go “all the way” to initiate the Chandy Lamport
> algorithm logic.
>
> The above flow has been proven using temporal logic in my phd thesis in
> case you are interested about the proof.
> I hope this helps a little clarifying things. Let me know if there is any
> confusing point to disambiguate. I would be more than happy to help if I
> can.
>
> Paris
>
> > On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:28, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for the input. Regarding the Chandy-Lamport snapshots don’t you
> still have to wait for the “checkpoint barrier” to arrive in order to know
> when have you already received all possible messages from the upstream
> tasks/operators? So instead of processing the “in flight” messages (as the
> Flink is doing

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Thomas Weise]

Great discussion! I'm excited that this is already under consideration! Are
there any JIRAs or other traces of discussion to follow?

Paris, if I understand correctly, then the proposal is to not block any
input channel at all, but only log data from the backpressured channel (and
make it part of the snapshot) until the barrier arrives? This is
intriguing. But probably there is also a benefit of to not continue reading
I1 since that could speed up retrieval from I2. Also, if the user code is
the cause of backpressure, this would avoid pumping more data into the
process function.

Thanks,
Thomas


On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 8:02 AM zhijiang 
wrote:

> Hi Paris,
>
> Thanks for the detailed sharing. And I think it is very similar with the
> way of overtaking we proposed before.
>
> There are some tiny difference:
> The way of overtaking might need to snapshot all the input/output queues.
> Chandy Lamport seems only need to snaphost (n-1) input channels after the
> first barrier arrives, which might reduce the state sizea bit. But normally
> there should be less buffers for the first input channel with barrier.
> The output barrier still follows with regular data stream in Chandy
> Lamport, the same way as current flink. For overtaking way, we need to pay
> extra efforts to make barrier transport firstly before outque queue on
> upstream side, and change the way of barrier alignment based on receiving
> instead of current reading on downstream side.
> In the backpressure caused by data skew, the first barrier in almost empty
> input channel should arrive much eariler than the last heavy load input
> channel, so the Chandy Lamport could benefit well. But for the case of all
> balanced heavy load input channels, I mean the first arrived barrier might
> still take much time, then the overtaking way could still fit well to speed
> up checkpoint.
> Anyway, your proposed suggestion is helpful on my side, especially
> considering some implementation details .
>
> Best,
> Zhijiang
> --
> From:Paris Carbone 
> Send Time:2019年8月13日(星期二) 14:03
> To:dev 
> Cc:zhijiang 
> Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure
>
> yes! It’s quite similar I think.  Though mind that the devil is in the
> details, i.e., the temporal order actions are taken.
>
> To clarify, let us say you have a task T with two input channels I1 and I2.
> The Chandy Lamport execution flow is the following:
>
> 1) T receives barrier from  I1 and...
> 2)  ...the following three actions happen atomically
>  I )  T snapshots its state T*
>  II)  T forwards marker to its outputs
>  III) T starts logging all events of I2 (only) into a buffer M*
> - Also notice here that T does NOT block I1 as it does in aligned
> snapshots -
> 3) Eventually T receives barrier from I2 and stops recording events. Its
> asynchronously captured snapshot is now complete: {T*,M*}.
> Upon recovery all messages of M* should be replayed in FIFO order.
>
> With this approach alignment does not create a deadlock situation since
> anyway 2.II happens asynchronously and messages can be logged as well
> asynchronously during the process of the snapshot. If there is
> back-pressure in a pipeline the cause is most probably not this algorithm.
>
> Back to your observation, the answer : yes and no.  In your network model,
> I can see the logic of “logging” and “committing” a final snapshot being
> provided by the channel implementation. However, do mind that the first
> barrier always needs to go “all the way” to initiate the Chandy Lamport
> algorithm logic.
>
> The above flow has been proven using temporal logic in my phd thesis in
> case you are interested about the proof.
> I hope this helps a little clarifying things. Let me know if there is any
> confusing point to disambiguate. I would be more than happy to help if I
> can.
>
> Paris
>
> > On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:28, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for the input. Regarding the Chandy-Lamport snapshots don’t you
> still have to wait for the “checkpoint barrier” to arrive in order to know
> when have you already received all possible messages from the upstream
> tasks/operators? So instead of processing the “in flight” messages (as the
> Flink is doing currently), you are sending them to an “observer”?
> >
> > In that case, that’s sounds similar to “checkpoint barriers overtaking
> in flight records” (aka unaligned checkpoints). Just for us, the observer
> is a snapshot state.
> >
> > Piotrek
> >
> >> On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:14, Paris Carbone 
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Interesting problem! Thanks for bringing it up Thomas.
> >>
> >> Ignore/Correct me if I am wrong but I believe Chandy-Lamport snapshots
> [1] would help out solve this problem more elegantly without sacrificing
> correctness.
> >> - They do not need alignment, only (async) logging for in-flight
> records between the time the first barrier is processed until the last
> barrier arrives in a task.
> >> - They work fine for

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[zhijiang]

Hi Paris,

Thanks for the detailed sharing. And I think it is very similar with the way of 
overtaking we proposed before.

There are some tiny difference:
The way of overtaking might need to snapshot all the input/output queues. 
Chandy Lamport seems only need to snaphost (n-1) input channels after the first 
barrier arrives, which might reduce the state sizea bit. But normally there 
should be less buffers for the first input channel with barrier.
The output barrier still follows with regular data stream in Chandy Lamport, 
the same way as current flink. For overtaking way, we need to pay extra efforts 
to make barrier transport firstly before outque queue on upstream side, and 
change the way of barrier alignment based on receiving instead of current 
reading on downstream side.
In the backpressure caused by data skew, the first barrier in almost empty 
input channel should arrive much eariler than the last heavy load input 
channel, so the Chandy Lamport could benefit well. But for the case of all 
balanced heavy load input channels, I mean the first arrived barrier might 
still take much time, then the overtaking way could still fit well to speed up 
checkpoint.
Anyway, your proposed suggestion is helpful on my side, especially considering 
some implementation details .

Best,
Zhijiang
--
From:Paris Carbone 
Send Time:2019年8月13日(星期二) 14:03
To:dev 
Cc:zhijiang 
Subject:Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

yes! It’s quite similar I think.  Though mind that the devil is in the details, 
i.e., the temporal order actions are taken.

To clarify, let us say you have a task T with two input channels I1 and I2.
The Chandy Lamport execution flow is the following:

1) T receives barrier from  I1 and...
2)  ...the following three actions happen atomically
 I )  T snapshots its state T*
 II)  T forwards marker to its outputs
 III) T starts logging all events of I2 (only) into a buffer M*
- Also notice here that T does NOT block I1 as it does in aligned snapshots -
3) Eventually T receives barrier from I2 and stops recording events. Its 
asynchronously captured snapshot is now complete: {T*,M*}. 
Upon recovery all messages of M* should be replayed in FIFO order.

With this approach alignment does not create a deadlock situation since anyway 
2.II happens asynchronously and messages can be logged as well asynchronously 
during the process of the snapshot. If there is back-pressure in a pipeline the 
cause is most probably not this algorithm.

Back to your observation, the answer : yes and no.  In your network model, I 
can see the logic of “logging” and “committing” a final snapshot being provided 
by the channel implementation. However, do mind that the first barrier always 
needs to go “all the way” to initiate the Chandy Lamport algorithm logic.

The above flow has been proven using temporal logic in my phd thesis in case 
you are interested about the proof.
I hope this helps a little clarifying things. Let me know if there is any 
confusing point to disambiguate. I would be more than happy to help if I can.

Paris

> On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:28, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the input. Regarding the Chandy-Lamport snapshots don’t you still 
> have to wait for the “checkpoint barrier” to arrive in order to know when 
> have you already received all possible messages from the upstream 
> tasks/operators? So instead of processing the “in flight” messages (as the 
> Flink is doing currently), you are sending them to an “observer”?
> 
> In that case, that’s sounds similar to “checkpoint barriers overtaking in 
> flight records” (aka unaligned checkpoints). Just for us, the observer is a 
> snapshot state.
> 
> Piotrek
> 
>> On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:14, Paris Carbone  wrote:
>> 
>> Interesting problem! Thanks for bringing it up Thomas.
>> 
>> Ignore/Correct me if I am wrong but I believe Chandy-Lamport snapshots [1] 
>> would help out solve this problem more elegantly without sacrificing 
>> correctness.
>> - They do not need alignment, only (async) logging for in-flight records 
>> between the time the first barrier is processed until the last barrier 
>> arrives in a task.
>> - They work fine for failure recovery as long as logged records are replayed 
>> on startup.
>> 
>> Flink’s “alligned” savepoints would probably be still necessary for 
>> transactional sink commits + any sort of reconfiguration (e.g., rescaling, 
>> updating the logic of operators to evolve an application etc.).
>> 
>> I don’t completely understand the “overtaking” approach but if you have a 
>> concrete definition I would be happy to check it out and help if I can!
>> Mind that Chandy-Lamport essentially does this by logging things in pending 
>> channels in a task snapshot before the barrier arrives.
>> 
>> -Paris
>> 
>> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandy%E2%80%93Lamport_algorithm 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 13 Aug 20

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Paris Carbone]

yes! It’s quite similar I think.  Though mind that the devil is in the details, 
i.e., the temporal order actions are taken.

To clarify, let us say you have a task T with two input channels I1 and I2.
The Chandy Lamport execution flow is the following:

1) T receives barrier from  I1 and...
2)  ...the following three actions happen atomically
I )  T snapshots its state T*
II)  T forwards marker to its outputs
III) T starts logging all events of I2 (only) into a buffer M*
- Also notice here that T does NOT block I1 as it does in aligned snapshots -
3) Eventually T receives barrier from I2 and stops recording events. Its 
asynchronously captured snapshot is now complete: {T*,M*}. 
Upon recovery all messages of M* should be replayed in FIFO order.

With this approach alignment does not create a deadlock situation since anyway 
2.II happens asynchronously and messages can be logged as well asynchronously 
during the process of the snapshot. If there is back-pressure in a pipeline the 
cause is most probably not this algorithm.

Back to your observation, the answer : yes and no.  In your network model, I 
can see the logic of “logging” and “committing” a final snapshot being provided 
by the channel implementation. However, do mind that the first barrier always 
needs to go “all the way” to initiate the Chandy Lamport algorithm logic.

The above flow has been proven using temporal logic in my phd thesis in case 
you are interested about the proof.
I hope this helps a little clarifying things. Let me know if there is any 
confusing point to disambiguate. I would be more than happy to help if I can.

Paris

> On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:28, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the input. Regarding the Chandy-Lamport snapshots don’t you still 
> have to wait for the “checkpoint barrier” to arrive in order to know when 
> have you already received all possible messages from the upstream 
> tasks/operators? So instead of processing the “in flight” messages (as the 
> Flink is doing currently), you are sending them to an “observer”?
> 
> In that case, that’s sounds similar to “checkpoint barriers overtaking in 
> flight records” (aka unaligned checkpoints). Just for us, the observer is a 
> snapshot state.
> 
> Piotrek
> 
>> On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:14, Paris Carbone  wrote:
>> 
>> Interesting problem! Thanks for bringing it up Thomas.
>> 
>> Ignore/Correct me if I am wrong but I believe Chandy-Lamport snapshots [1] 
>> would help out solve this problem more elegantly without sacrificing 
>> correctness.
>> - They do not need alignment, only (async) logging for in-flight records 
>> between the time the first barrier is processed until the last barrier 
>> arrives in a task.
>> - They work fine for failure recovery as long as logged records are replayed 
>> on startup.
>> 
>> Flink’s “alligned” savepoints would probably be still necessary for 
>> transactional sink commits + any sort of reconfiguration (e.g., rescaling, 
>> updating the logic of operators to evolve an application etc.).
>> 
>> I don’t completely understand the “overtaking” approach but if you have a 
>> concrete definition I would be happy to check it out and help if I can!
>> Mind that Chandy-Lamport essentially does this by logging things in pending 
>> channels in a task snapshot before the barrier arrives.
>> 
>> -Paris
>> 
>> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandy%E2%80%93Lamport_algorithm 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 13 Aug 2019, at 10:27, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Thomas,
>>> 
>>> As Zhijiang has responded, we are now in the process of discussing how to 
>>> address this issue and one of the solution that we are discussing is 
>>> exactly what you are proposing: checkpoint barriers overtaking the in 
>>> flight data and make the in flight data part of the checkpoint.
>>> 
>>> If everything works well, we will be able to present result of our 
>>> discussions on the dev mailing list soon. 
>>> 
>>> Piotrek
>>> 
 On 12 Aug 2019, at 23:23, zhijiang  
 wrote:
 
 Hi Thomas,
 
 Thanks for proposing this concern. The barrier alignment takes long time 
 in backpressure case which could cause several problems:
 1. Checkpoint timeout as you mentioned.
 2. The recovery cost is high once failover, because much data needs to be 
 replayed.
 3. The delay for commit-based sink is high in exactly-once.
 
 For credit-based flow control from release-1.5, the amount of in-flighting 
 buffers before barrier alignment is reduced, so we could get a bit
 benefits from speeding checkpoint aspect.
 
 In release-1.8, I guess we did not suspend the channels which already 
 received the barrier in practice. But actually we ever did the similar 
 thing
 to speed barrier alighment before. I am not quite sure that release-1.8 
 covers this feature. There were some relevant discussions under jira [1].
 
 F

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Piotr Nowojski]

Thanks for the input. Regarding the Chandy-Lamport snapshots don’t you still 
have to wait for the “checkpoint barrier” to arrive in order to know when have 
you already received all possible messages from the upstream tasks/operators? 
So instead of processing the “in flight” messages (as the Flink is doing 
currently), you are sending them to an “observer”?

In that case, that’s sounds similar to “checkpoint barriers overtaking in 
flight records” (aka unaligned checkpoints). Just for us, the observer is a 
snapshot state.

Piotrek

> On 13 Aug 2019, at 13:14, Paris Carbone  wrote:
> 
> Interesting problem! Thanks for bringing it up Thomas.
> 
> Ignore/Correct me if I am wrong but I believe Chandy-Lamport snapshots [1] 
> would help out solve this problem more elegantly without sacrificing 
> correctness.
> - They do not need alignment, only (async) logging for in-flight records 
> between the time the first barrier is processed until the last barrier 
> arrives in a task.
> - They work fine for failure recovery as long as logged records are replayed 
> on startup.
> 
> Flink’s “alligned” savepoints would probably be still necessary for 
> transactional sink commits + any sort of reconfiguration (e.g., rescaling, 
> updating the logic of operators to evolve an application etc.).
> 
> I don’t completely understand the “overtaking” approach but if you have a 
> concrete definition I would be happy to check it out and help if I can!
> Mind that Chandy-Lamport essentially does this by logging things in pending 
> channels in a task snapshot before the barrier arrives.
> 
> -Paris
> 
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandy%E2%80%93Lamport_algorithm 
> 
> 
>> On 13 Aug 2019, at 10:27, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Thomas,
>> 
>> As Zhijiang has responded, we are now in the process of discussing how to 
>> address this issue and one of the solution that we are discussing is exactly 
>> what you are proposing: checkpoint barriers overtaking the in flight data 
>> and make the in flight data part of the checkpoint.
>> 
>> If everything works well, we will be able to present result of our 
>> discussions on the dev mailing list soon. 
>> 
>> Piotrek
>> 
>>> On 12 Aug 2019, at 23:23, zhijiang  
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Thomas,
>>> 
>>> Thanks for proposing this concern. The barrier alignment takes long time in 
>>> backpressure case which could cause several problems:
>>> 1. Checkpoint timeout as you mentioned.
>>> 2. The recovery cost is high once failover, because much data needs to be 
>>> replayed.
>>> 3. The delay for commit-based sink is high in exactly-once.
>>> 
>>> For credit-based flow control from release-1.5, the amount of in-flighting 
>>> buffers before barrier alignment is reduced, so we could get a bit
>>> benefits from speeding checkpoint aspect.
>>> 
>>> In release-1.8, I guess we did not suspend the channels which already 
>>> received the barrier in practice. But actually we ever did the similar thing
>>> to speed barrier alighment before. I am not quite sure that release-1.8 
>>> covers this feature. There were some relevant discussions under jira [1].
>>> 
>>> For release-1.10, the community is now discussing the feature of unaligned 
>>> checkpoint which is mainly for resolving above concerns. The basic idea
>>> is to make barrier overtakes the output/input buffer queue to speed 
>>> alignment, and snapshot the input/output buffers as part of checkpoint 
>>> state. The
>>> details have not confirmed yet and is still under discussion. Wish we could 
>>> make some improvments for the release-1.10.
>>> 
>>> [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-8523
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> Zhijiang
>>> --
>>> From:Thomas Weise 
>>> Send Time:2019年8月12日(星期一) 21:38
>>> To:dev 
>>> Subject:Checkpointing under backpressure
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> One of the major operational difficulties we observe with Flink are
>>> checkpoint timeouts under backpressure. I'm looking for both confirmation
>>> of my understanding of the current behavior as well as pointers for future
>>> improvement work:
>>> 
>>> Prior to introduction of credit based flow control in the network stack [1]
>>> [2], checkpoint barriers would back up with the data for all logical
>>> channels due to TCP backpressure. Since Flink 1.5, the buffers are
>>> controlled per channel, and checkpoint barriers are only held back for
>>> channels that have backpressure, while others can continue processing
>>> normally. However, checkpoint barriers still cannot "overtake data",
>>> therefore checkpoint alignment remains affected for the channel with
>>> backpressure, with the potential for slow checkpointing and timeouts.
>>> Albeit the delay of barriers would be capped by the maximum in-transit
>>> buffers per channel, resulting in an improvement compared to previous
>>> versions of Flink. Also, the backpressure based checkpoint 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Paris Carbone]

Interesting problem! Thanks for bringing it up Thomas.

Ignore/Correct me if I am wrong but I believe Chandy-Lamport snapshots [1] 
would help out solve this problem more elegantly without sacrificing 
correctness.
- They do not need alignment, only (async) logging for in-flight records 
between the time the first barrier is processed until the last barrier arrives 
in a task.
- They work fine for failure recovery as long as logged records are replayed on 
startup.

Flink’s “alligned” savepoints would probably be still necessary for 
transactional sink commits + any sort of reconfiguration (e.g., rescaling, 
updating the logic of operators to evolve an application etc.).

I don’t completely understand the “overtaking” approach but if you have a 
concrete definition I would be happy to check it out and help if I can!
Mind that Chandy-Lamport essentially does this by logging things in pending 
channels in a task snapshot before the barrier arrives.

-Paris

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandy%E2%80%93Lamport_algorithm 


> On 13 Aug 2019, at 10:27, Piotr Nowojski  wrote:
> 
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> As Zhijiang has responded, we are now in the process of discussing how to 
> address this issue and one of the solution that we are discussing is exactly 
> what you are proposing: checkpoint barriers overtaking the in flight data and 
> make the in flight data part of the checkpoint.
> 
> If everything works well, we will be able to present result of our 
> discussions on the dev mailing list soon. 
> 
> Piotrek
> 
>> On 12 Aug 2019, at 23:23, zhijiang  
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Thomas,
>> 
>> Thanks for proposing this concern. The barrier alignment takes long time in 
>> backpressure case which could cause several problems:
>> 1. Checkpoint timeout as you mentioned.
>> 2. The recovery cost is high once failover, because much data needs to be 
>> replayed.
>> 3. The delay for commit-based sink is high in exactly-once.
>> 
>> For credit-based flow control from release-1.5, the amount of in-flighting 
>> buffers before barrier alignment is reduced, so we could get a bit
>> benefits from speeding checkpoint aspect.
>> 
>> In release-1.8, I guess we did not suspend the channels which already 
>> received the barrier in practice. But actually we ever did the similar thing
>> to speed barrier alighment before. I am not quite sure that release-1.8 
>> covers this feature. There were some relevant discussions under jira [1].
>> 
>> For release-1.10, the community is now discussing the feature of unaligned 
>> checkpoint which is mainly for resolving above concerns. The basic idea
>> is to make barrier overtakes the output/input buffer queue to speed 
>> alignment, and snapshot the input/output buffers as part of checkpoint 
>> state. The
>> details have not confirmed yet and is still under discussion. Wish we could 
>> make some improvments for the release-1.10.
>> 
>> [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-8523
>> 
>> Best,
>> Zhijiang
>> --
>> From:Thomas Weise 
>> Send Time:2019年8月12日(星期一) 21:38
>> To:dev 
>> Subject:Checkpointing under backpressure
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> One of the major operational difficulties we observe with Flink are
>> checkpoint timeouts under backpressure. I'm looking for both confirmation
>> of my understanding of the current behavior as well as pointers for future
>> improvement work:
>> 
>> Prior to introduction of credit based flow control in the network stack [1]
>> [2], checkpoint barriers would back up with the data for all logical
>> channels due to TCP backpressure. Since Flink 1.5, the buffers are
>> controlled per channel, and checkpoint barriers are only held back for
>> channels that have backpressure, while others can continue processing
>> normally. However, checkpoint barriers still cannot "overtake data",
>> therefore checkpoint alignment remains affected for the channel with
>> backpressure, with the potential for slow checkpointing and timeouts.
>> Albeit the delay of barriers would be capped by the maximum in-transit
>> buffers per channel, resulting in an improvement compared to previous
>> versions of Flink. Also, the backpressure based checkpoint alignment can
>> help the barrier advance faster on the receiver side (by suspending
>> channels that have already delivered the barrier). Is that accurate as of
>> Flink 1.8?
>> 
>> What appears to be missing to completely unblock checkpointing is a
>> mechanism for checkpoints to overtake the data. That would help in
>> situations where the processing itself is the bottleneck and prioritization
>> in the network stack alone cannot address the barrier delay. Was there any
>> related discussion? One possible solution would be to drain incoming data
>> till the barrier and make it part of the checkpoint instead of processing
>> it. This is somewhat related to asynchronous processing, but I'm thinking
>> mor

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[Piotr Nowojski]

Hi Thomas,

As Zhijiang has responded, we are now in the process of discussing how to 
address this issue and one of the solution that we are discussing is exactly 
what you are proposing: checkpoint barriers overtaking the in flight data and 
make the in flight data part of the checkpoint.

If everything works well, we will be able to present result of our discussions 
on the dev mailing list soon. 

Piotrek

> On 12 Aug 2019, at 23:23, zhijiang  wrote:
> 
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> Thanks for proposing this concern. The barrier alignment takes long time in 
> backpressure case which could cause several problems:
> 1. Checkpoint timeout as you mentioned.
> 2. The recovery cost is high once failover, because much data needs to be 
> replayed.
> 3. The delay for commit-based sink is high in exactly-once.
> 
> For credit-based flow control from release-1.5, the amount of in-flighting 
> buffers before barrier alignment is reduced, so we could get a bit
> benefits from speeding checkpoint aspect.
> 
> In release-1.8, I guess we did not suspend the channels which already 
> received the barrier in practice. But actually we ever did the similar thing
> to speed barrier alighment before. I am not quite sure that release-1.8 
> covers this feature. There were some relevant discussions under jira [1].
> 
> For release-1.10, the community is now discussing the feature of unaligned 
> checkpoint which is mainly for resolving above concerns. The basic idea
> is to make barrier overtakes the output/input buffer queue to speed 
> alignment, and snapshot the input/output buffers as part of checkpoint state. 
> The
> details have not confirmed yet and is still under discussion. Wish we could 
> make some improvments for the release-1.10.
> 
> [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-8523
> 
> Best,
> Zhijiang
> --
> From:Thomas Weise 
> Send Time:2019年8月12日(星期一) 21:38
> To:dev 
> Subject:Checkpointing under backpressure
> 
> Hi,
> 
> One of the major operational difficulties we observe with Flink are
> checkpoint timeouts under backpressure. I'm looking for both confirmation
> of my understanding of the current behavior as well as pointers for future
> improvement work:
> 
> Prior to introduction of credit based flow control in the network stack [1]
> [2], checkpoint barriers would back up with the data for all logical
> channels due to TCP backpressure. Since Flink 1.5, the buffers are
> controlled per channel, and checkpoint barriers are only held back for
> channels that have backpressure, while others can continue processing
> normally. However, checkpoint barriers still cannot "overtake data",
> therefore checkpoint alignment remains affected for the channel with
> backpressure, with the potential for slow checkpointing and timeouts.
> Albeit the delay of barriers would be capped by the maximum in-transit
> buffers per channel, resulting in an improvement compared to previous
> versions of Flink. Also, the backpressure based checkpoint alignment can
> help the barrier advance faster on the receiver side (by suspending
> channels that have already delivered the barrier). Is that accurate as of
> Flink 1.8?
> 
> What appears to be missing to completely unblock checkpointing is a
> mechanism for checkpoints to overtake the data. That would help in
> situations where the processing itself is the bottleneck and prioritization
> in the network stack alone cannot address the barrier delay. Was there any
> related discussion? One possible solution would be to drain incoming data
> till the barrier and make it part of the checkpoint instead of processing
> it. This is somewhat related to asynchronous processing, but I'm thinking
> more of a solution that is automated in the Flink runtime for the
> backpressure scenario only.
> 
> Thanks,
> Thomas
> 
> [1] https://flink.apache.org/2019/06/05/flink-network-stack.html
> [2]
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1chTOuOqe0sBsjldA_r-wXYeSIhU2zRGpUaTaik7QZ84/edit#heading=h.pjh6mv7m2hjn
> 

Re: Checkpointing under backpressure

[zhijiang]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for proposing this concern. The barrier alignment takes long time in 
backpressure case which could cause several problems:
1. Checkpoint timeout as you mentioned.
2. The recovery cost is high once failover, because much data needs to be 
replayed.
3. The delay for commit-based sink is high in exactly-once.

For credit-based flow control from release-1.5, the amount of in-flighting 
buffers before barrier alignment is reduced, so we could get a bit
benefits from speeding checkpoint aspect.

In release-1.8, I guess we did not suspend the channels which already received 
the barrier in practice. But actually we ever did the similar thing
to speed barrier alighment before. I am not quite sure that release-1.8 covers 
this feature. There were some relevant discussions under jira [1].

For release-1.10, the community is now discussing the feature of unaligned 
checkpoint which is mainly for resolving above concerns. The basic idea
is to make barrier overtakes the output/input buffer queue to speed alignment, 
and snapshot the input/output buffers as part of checkpoint state. The
details have not confirmed yet and is still under discussion. Wish we could 
make some improvments for the release-1.10.

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-8523

Best,
Zhijiang
--
From:Thomas Weise 
Send Time:2019年8月12日(星期一) 21:38
To:dev 
Subject:Checkpointing under backpressure

Hi,

One of the major operational difficulties we observe with Flink are
checkpoint timeouts under backpressure. I'm looking for both confirmation
of my understanding of the current behavior as well as pointers for future
improvement work:

Prior to introduction of credit based flow control in the network stack [1]
[2], checkpoint barriers would back up with the data for all logical
channels due to TCP backpressure. Since Flink 1.5, the buffers are
controlled per channel, and checkpoint barriers are only held back for
channels that have backpressure, while others can continue processing
normally. However, checkpoint barriers still cannot "overtake data",
therefore checkpoint alignment remains affected for the channel with
backpressure, with the potential for slow checkpointing and timeouts.
Albeit the delay of barriers would be capped by the maximum in-transit
buffers per channel, resulting in an improvement compared to previous
versions of Flink. Also, the backpressure based checkpoint alignment can
help the barrier advance faster on the receiver side (by suspending
channels that have already delivered the barrier). Is that accurate as of
Flink 1.8?

What appears to be missing to completely unblock checkpointing is a
mechanism for checkpoints to overtake the data. That would help in
situations where the processing itself is the bottleneck and prioritization
in the network stack alone cannot address the barrier delay. Was there any
related discussion? One possible solution would be to drain incoming data
till the barrier and make it part of the checkpoint instead of processing
it. This is somewhat related to asynchronous processing, but I'm thinking
more of a solution that is automated in the Flink runtime for the
backpressure scenario only.

Thanks,
Thomas

[1] https://flink.apache.org/2019/06/05/flink-network-stack.html
[2]
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1chTOuOqe0sBsjldA_r-wXYeSIhU2zRGpUaTaik7QZ84/edit#heading=h.pjh6mv7m2hjn