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Flink Jira Bot updated FLINK-17723:
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    Labels: auto-deprioritized-major stale-minor  (was: 
auto-deprioritized-major)

I am the [Flink Jira Bot|https://github.com/apache/flink-jira-bot/] and I help 
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Minor but is unassigned and neither itself nor its Sub-Tasks have been updated 
for 180 days. I have gone ahead and marked it "stale-minor". If this ticket is 
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> Written design for flink threading model and guarantees made to the various 
> structual components
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: FLINK-17723
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-17723
>             Project: Flink
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: Documentation
>            Reporter: John Lonergan
>            Priority: Minor
>              Labels: auto-deprioritized-major, stale-minor
>
> I enjoy using Flink but ...
> Do we have a written design for the threading model including the guarantees 
> made by the core framework in terms of threading and concurrency.
> Looking at various existing components such as JDBC and file sinks and other 
> non-core facilities.
> Having some difficulty understanding the intended design.
> Want to understand the assumptions I can make about when certain functions 
> will be called (for example JDBCOutputFormat  open vs flush vs writeRecord vs 
> close) and whether this will always be from the same thread or some other 
> thread, or whether they might be called concurrently, in order to verify the 
> correctness of the code. 
> What guarantees are there?
> Does a certain reference need a volatile or even a synchronisation or not.
> What's the design for threading?
> If the intended design is not written down then we have to infer it from the 
> code and we will definitiely come to different conclusions and thus bugs and 
> leaks. and other avoidable horrors.
> It's really hard writing good MT code and a strong design is necessary to 
> provide a framework for the code.
> Some info here 
> https://flink.apache.org/contributing/code-style-and-quality-common.html#concurrency-and-threading
>  , but this isn't a design and doesn't say how it's meant to work. However 
> that page does agree that writing MT code is very hard and this just 
> underlines the need for a strong and detailed design for this aspect. 
> ==
> Another supporting example. 
> When I see code like this ...
> FileOutputFormat
>     
> {code:java}
>    public void close() throws IOException {
>               final FSDataOutputStream s = this.stream;
>               if (s != null) {
>                       this.stream = null;
>                       s.close();
>               }
>       }
> {code}
> My feeling is that someone else wasn't sure what the right approach was.
> I can only guess that the author was concerned that someone else was going to 
> call the function concurrently, or mess with the class state by some other 
> means. And, if that were true then would this code even be MT safe - who 
> knows? Ought there be a volatile in there or a plain old sync? Or perhaps 
> none of the caution is needed at all (framework guarantees preventing the 
> need)?
> Or take a look at the extensive sychronisation efforts in 
> https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink-connectors/flink-hadoop-compatibility/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/api/java/hadoop/mapred/HadoopOutputFormatBase.java
>  is this code correct? Not to mention that fact that this close() method 
> might throw an NPE if there is any possiblity that 'this.outputCommitter' 
> might not have been initialised in open OR is the framework can ever call 
> close()  without open() having completed.
> I find if worrying that I see a lot of code in the project that is similarly 
> uncertain and inconsistent syncronisation and resource management.
> I would have hoped that the underlying core framework provided guarantees 
> that avoided the need to have extensive synchronisation effort in derived or 
> auxiliary classes.
> What's the design.



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