Dataflow job stuck and not reading messages from PubSub - google-cloud-platform

I have a dataflow job which reads JSON from 3 PubSub topics, flattening them in one, apply some transformations and save to BigQuery.
I'm using a GlobalWindow with following configuration.
.apply(Window.<PubsubMessage>into(new GlobalWindows()).triggering(AfterWatermark.pastEndOfWindow()
.withEarlyFirings(AfterFirst.of(AfterPane.elementCountAtLeast(20000),
AfterProcessingTime.pastFirstElementInPane().plusDelayOf(durations))))
.discardingFiredPanes());
The job is running with following configuration
Max Workers : 20
Disk Size: 10GB
Machine Type : n1-standard-4
Autoscaling Algo: Throughput Based
The problem I'm facing is that after processing few messages (approx ~80k) the job stops reading messages from PubSub. There is a backlog of close to 10 Million messages in one of those topics and yet the Dataflow Job is not reading the messages or autoscaling.
I also checked the CPU usage of each worker and that is also hovering in single digit after initial burst.
I've tried changing machine type and max worker configuration but nothing seems to work.
How should I approach this problem ?

I suspect the windowing function is the culprit. GlobalWindow isn't suited to streaming jobs (which I assume this job is, due to the use of PubSub), because it won't fire the window until all elements are present, which never happens in a streaming context.
In your situation, it looks like the window will fire early once, when it hits either that element count or duration, but after that the window will get stuck waiting for all the elements to finally arrive. A quick fix to check if this is the case is to wrap the early firings in a Repeatedly.forever trigger, like so:
withEarlyFirings(
Repeatedly.forever(
AfterFirst.of(
AfterPane.elementCountAtLeast(20000),
AfterProcessingTime.pastFirstElementInPane().plusDelayOf(durations)))))
This should allow the early firing to fire repeatedly, preventing the window from getting stuck.
However for a more permanent solution I recommend moving away from using GlobalWindow in streaming pipelines. Using fixed-time windows with early firings based on element count would give you the same behavior, but without risk of getting stuck.

Related

Dataflow discarding massive amount of events due to Window object or inner processing

Been recently developing a Dataflow consumer which read from a PubSub subscription and outputs to Parquet files the combination of all those objects grouped within the same window.
While I was doing testing of this without a huge load everything seemed to work fine.
However, after performing some heavy testing I can see that from 1.000.000 events sent to that PubSub queue, only 1000 make it to Parquet!
According to multiple wall times across different stages, the one which parses the events prior applying the window seems to last 58 minutes. The last stage which writes to Parquet files lasts 1h and 32 minutes.
I will show now the most relevant parts of the code within, hope you can shed some light if its due to the logic that comes before the Window object definition or if it's the Window object iself.
pipeline
.apply("Reading PubSub Events",
PubsubIO.readMessagesWithAttributes()
.fromSubscription(options.getSubscription()))
.apply("Map to AvroSchemaRecord (GenericRecord)",
ParDo.of(new PubsubMessageToGenericRecord()))
.setCoder(AvroCoder.of(AVRO_SCHEMA))
.apply("15m window",
Window.<GenericRecord>into(FixedWindows.of(Duration.standardMinutes(15)))
.triggering(AfterProcessingTime
.pastFirstElementInPane()
.plusDelayOf(Duration.standardSeconds(1)))
.withAllowedLateness(Duration.ZERO)
.accumulatingFiredPanes()
)
Also note that I'm running Beam 2.9.0.
Could the logic inside the second stage be too heavy so that messages arrive too late and get discarded in the Window? The logic basically consists reading the payload, parsing into a POJO (reading inner Map attributes, filtering and such)
However, if I sent a million events to PubSub, all those million events make it till the Parquet write to file stage, but then those Parquet files don't contain all those events, just partially. Does that make sense?
I would need the trigger to consume all those events independently of the delay.
Citing from an answer on the Apache Beam mailing list:
This is an unfortunate usability problem with triggers where you can accidentally close the window and drop all data. I think instead, you probably want this trigger:
Repeatedly.forever(
AfterProcessingTime
.pastFirstElementInPane()
.plusDelayOf(Duration.standardSeconds(1)))
The way I recommend to express this trigger is:
AfterWatermark.pastEndOfWindow().withEarlyFirings(
AfterProcessingTime
.pastFirstElementInPane()
.plusDelayOf(Duration.standardSeconds(1)))
In the second case it is impossible to accidentally "close" the window and drop all data.

Azure Batch Job sequential execution not working

We are using azure web job for batch processing, the job will trigger when there is a message in the storage queue.
We have configured the job to execute the messages one by one.
JobHostConfiguration config = new JobHostConfiguration();
config.Queues.BatchSize = 1;
config.Queues.MaxDequeueCount = 1;
even though the job is taking multiple messages from the storage queue and executing parallelly.
Please help.
taking multiple messages from the storage queue and executing
parallelly
How did you judge take multiple messages and executing in parallel? Did you have multiple instances?
I test the code in different situations.
1)The normal situation ,not set the batchsize, it will drag all messages in the queue.However i think it still run one by one.But from the result i think it won't wait last running completely over.Here is result.
2)Set the batchsize to 1, if you debug the code or refresh the queue frequently, you will find it did drag one message one time run. And here is result.
3) Set the batchsize to three and debug , it just change the message number dragged, each time it will drag 3 messages, then it will run like normal without setting batchsize.Here is the result.And i found if you just run not debug , the order console showing is very orgnized.
So if you don't have other instance running, i think this is working in sequential mode.
If this doesn't match your requirements or you still have questions, please let me know.

Cloud Dataflow: Side effect when watermark advances

Working with a streaming, unbounded PCollection in Google Dataflow that originates from a Cloud PubSub subscription. We are using this as a firehose to simply deliver events to BigTable continuously. Everything with the delivery is performing nicely.
Our problem is that we have downstream batch jobs that expect to read a day's worth of data out of BigTable once it is delivered. I would like to utilize windowing and triggering to implement a side effect that will write a marker row out to bigtable when the watermark advances beyond the day threshold, indicating that dataflow has reason to believe that most of the events have been delivered (we don't need strong guarantees on completeness, just reasonable ones) and that downstream processing can begin.
What we've tried is write out the raw events as one sink in the pipeline, and then window into another sink, using the timing information in the pane to determine if the watermark has advanced. The problem with this approach is that it operates upon the raw events themselves again, which is undesirable since it would repeat writing the event rows. We can prevent this write, but the parallel path in the pipeline would still be operating over the windowed streams of events.
Is there an effecient way to attach a callback-of-sorts to the watermark, such that we can perform a single action when the watermark advances?
The general ability to set a timer in event time and receive a callback is definitely an important feature request, filed as BEAM-27, which is under active development.
But actually your approach of windowing into FixedWindows.of(Duration.standardDays(1)) seems like it will accomplish your goal using just the features of the Dataflow Java SDK 1.x. Instead of forking your pipeline, you can maintain the "firehose" behavior by adding the trigger AfterPane.elementCountAtLeast(1). It does incur the cost of a GroupByKey but does not duplicate anything.
The complete pipeline might look like this:
pipeline
// Read your data from Cloud Pubsub and parse to MyValue
.apply(PubsubIO.Read.topic(...).withCoder(MyValueCoder.of())
// You'll need some keys
.apply(WithKeys.<MyKey, MyValue>of(...))
// Window into daily windows, but still output as fast as possible
.apply(Window.into(FixedWindows.of(Duration.standardDays(1)))
.triggering(AfterPane.elementCountAtLeast(1)))
// GroupByKey adds the necessary EARLY / ON_TIME / LATE labeling
.apply(GroupByKey.<MyKey, MyValue>create())
// Convert KV<MyKey, Iterable<MyValue>>
// to KV<ByteString, Iterable<Mutation>>
// where the iterable of mutations has the "end of day" marker if
// it was ON_TIME
.apply(MapElements.via(new MessageToMutationWithEndOfWindow())
// Write it!
.apply(BigTableIO.Write.to(...);
Please do comment on my answer if I have missed some detail of your use case.

Does the Zookeeper Watches system have a bug, or is this a limitation of the CAP theorem?

The Zookeeper Watches documentation states:
"A client will see a watch event for a znode it is watching before seeing the new data that corresponds to that znode." Furthermore, "Because watches are one time triggers and there is latency between getting the event and sending a new request to get a watch you cannot reliably see every change that happens to a node in ZooKeeper."
The point is, there is no guarantee you'll get a watch notification.
This is important, because in a sytem like Clojure's Avout, you're trying to mimic Clojure's Software Transactional Memory, over the network using Zookeeper. This relies on there being a watch notification for every change.
Now I'm trying to work out if this is a coding flaw, or a fundamental computer science problem, (ie the CAP Theorem).
My question is: Does the Zookeeper Watches system have a bug, or is this a limitation of the CAP theorem?
This seems to be a limitation in the way ZooKeeper implements watches, not a limitation of the CAP theorem. There is an open feature request to add continuous watch to ZooKeeper: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ZOOKEEPER-1416.
etcd has a watch function that uses long polling. The limitation here which you need to account for is that multiple events may happen between receiving the first long poll result, and re-polling. This is roughly analogous to the issue with ZooKeeper. However they have a solution:
However, the watch command can do more than this. Using the index [passing the last index we've seen], we can watch for commands that have happened in the past. This is useful for ensuring you don't miss events between watch commands.
curl -L 'http://127.0.0.1:4001/v2/keys/foo?wait=true&waitIndex=7'

What happens to running processes on a continuous Azure WebJob when website is redeployed?

I've read about graceful shutdowns here using the WEBJOBS_SHUTDOWN_FILE and here using Cancellation Tokens, so I understand the premise of graceful shutdowns, however I'm not sure how they will affect WebJobs that are in the middle of processing a queue message.
So here's the scenario:
I have a WebJob with functions listening to queues.
Message is added to Queue and job begins processing.
While processing, someone pushes to develop, triggering a redeploy.
Assuming I have my WebJobs hooked up to deploy on git pushes, this deploy will also trigger the WebJobs to be updated, which (as far as I understand) will kick off some sort of shutdown workflow in the jobs. So I have a few questions stemming from that.
Will jobs in the middle of processing a queue message finish processing the message before the job quits? Or is any shutdown notification essentially treated as "this bitch is about to shutdown. If you don't have anything to handle it, you're SOL."
If we are SOL, is our best option for handling shutdowns essentially to wrap anything you're doing in the equivalent of DB transactions and implement your shutdown handler in such a way that all changes are rolled back on shutdown?
If a queue message is in the middle of being processed and the WebJob shuts down, will that message be requeued? If not, does that mean that my shutdown handler needs to handle requeuing that message?
Is it possible for functions listening to queues to grab any more queue messages after the Job has been notified that it needs to shutdown?
Any guidance here is greatly appreciated! Also, if anyone has any other useful links on how to handle job shutdowns besides the ones I mentioned, it would be great if you could share those.
After no small amount of testing, I think I've found the answers to my questions and I hope someone else can gain some insight from my experience.
NOTE: All of these scenarios were tested using .NET Console Apps and Azure queues, so I'm not sure how blobs or table storage, or different types of Job file types, would handle these different scenarios.
After a Job has been marked to exit, the triggered functions that are running will have the configured amount of time (grace period) (5 seconds by default, but I think that is configurable by using a settings.job file) to finish before they are exited. If they do not finish in the grace period, the function quits. Main() (or whichever file you declared host.RunAndBlock() in), however, will finish running any code after host.RunAndBlock() for up to the amount of time remaining in the grace period (I'm not sure how that would work if you used an infinite loop instead of RunAndBlock). As far as handling the quit in your functions, you can essentially "listen" to the CancellationToken that you can pass in to your triggered functions for IsCancellationRequired and then handle it accordingly. Also, you are not SOL if you don't handle the quits yourself. Huzzah! See point #3.
While you are not SOL if you don't handle the quit (see point #3), I do think it is a good idea to wrap all of your jobs in transactions that you won't commit until you're absolutely sure the job has ran its course. This way if your function exits mid-process, you'll be less likely to have to worry about corrupted data. I can think of a couple scenarios where you might want to commit transactions as they pass (batch jobs, for instance), however you would need to structure your data or logic so that previously processed entities aren't reprocessed after the job restarts.
You are not in trouble if you don't handle job quits yourself. My understanding of what's going on under the covers is virtually non-existent, however I am quite sure of the results. If a function is in the middle of processing a queue message and is forced to quit before it can finish, HAVE NO FEAR! When the job grabs the message to process, it will essentially hide it on the queue for a certain amount of time. If your function quits while processing the message, that message will "become visible" again after x amount of time, and it will be re-grabbed and ran against the potentially updated code that was just deployed.
So I have about 90% confidence in my findings for #4. And I say that because to attempt to test it involved quick-switching between windows while not actually being totally sure what was going on with certain pieces. But here's what I found: on the off chance that a queue has a new message added to it in the grace period b4 a job quits, I THINK one of two things can happen: If the function doesn't poll that queue before the job quits, then the message will stay on the queue and it will be grabbed when the job restarts. However if the function DOES grab the message, it will be treated the same as any other message that was interrupted: it will "become visible" on the queue again and be reran upon the restart of the job.
That pretty much sums it up. I hope other people will find this useful. Let me know if you want any of this expounded on and I'll be happy to try. Or if I'm full of it and you have lots of corrections, those are probably more welcome!