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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-6989?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=16626058#comment-16626058
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sam commented on KAFKA-6989:
----------------------------

[~virgilp] 

> num-stream-threads just allows you to process more than one partition in 
>parallel, in a single process. It's still synchronous, in that you can't have 
>multiple messages processed in parallel, from the same partition. 

 

Thanks, very helpful. That should be explicit in the documentation, i.e. that 
it's not currently async.

 

> at the end of processing, you need to use your own kafka producer for writing 
>back the result, and there are some pitfalls /misconfigurations that may 
>happen there


Yes we tried this, and we ended up reimplementing akka-streams.

 

> This ticket is about adding this sort of async processing as a "first class" 
>stream processor in Kafka Streams. 

Yes it's a good idea.

 

> Support Async Processing in Streams
> -----------------------------------
>
>                 Key: KAFKA-6989
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-6989
>             Project: Kafka
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: streams
>            Reporter: Guozhang Wang
>            Priority: Major
>              Labels: needs-kip
>
> Today Kafka Streams use a single-thread per task architecture to achieve 
> embarrassing parallelism and good isolation. However there are a couple 
> scenarios where async processing may be preferable:
> 1) External resource access or heavy IOs with high-latency. Suppose you need 
> to access a remote REST api, read / write to an external store, or do a heavy 
> disk IO operation that may result in high latency. Current threading model 
> would block any other records before this record's done, waiting on the 
> remote call / IO to finish.
> 2) Robust failure handling with retries. Imagine the app-level processing of 
> a (non-corrupted) record fails (e.g. the user attempted to do a RPC to an 
> external system, and this call failed), and failed records are moved into a 
> separate "retry" topic. How can you process such failed records in a scalable 
> way? For example, imagine you need to implement a retry policy such as "retry 
> with exponential backoff". Here, you have the problem that 1. you can't 
> really pause processing a single record because this will pause the 
> processing of the full stream (bottleneck!) and 2. there is no 
> straight-forward way to "sort" failed records based on their "next retry 
> time" (think: priority queue).
> 3) Delayed processing. One use case is delaying re-processing (e.g. "delay 
> re-processing this event for 5 minutes") as mentioned in 2), another is for 
> implementing a scheduler: e.g. do some additional operations later based on 
> this processed record. based on Zalando Dublin, for example, are implementing 
> a distributed web crawler. Note that although this feature can be handled in 
> punctuation, it is not well aligned with our current offset committing 
> behavior, which always advance the offset once the record has been done 
> traversing the topology.
> I'm thinking of two options to support this feature:
> 1. Make the commit() mechanism more customizable to users for them to 
> implement multi-threading processing themselves: users can always do async 
> processing in the Processor API by spawning a thread-poll, e.g. but the key 
> is that the offset to be committed should be only advanced with such async 
> processing is done. This is a light-weight approach: we provide all the 
> pieces and tools, and users stack them up to build their own LEGOs.
> 2. Provide an general API to do async processing in Processor API, and take 
> care of the offsets committing internally. This is a heavy-weight approach: 
> the API may not cover all async scenarios, but it is a easy way to cover the 
> rest majority scenarios, and users do not need to worry of internal 
> implementation details such as offsets and fault tolerance.



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