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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-8438?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=16852639#comment-16852639
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Boyang Chen commented on KAFKA-8438:
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Hey Richard, thanks for the update. I'm still not quite clear the purpose of
adding this callback at the moment. Quoted from your original statement:
```When called, this method could be used to log a consumer failure or should
the user wish it, create a new thread which would then rejoin the consumer
group (which could also include the required {{group.instance.id}} so that a
rebalance wouldn't be re-triggered –- we would need to think about that). ```
I think logging a consumer failure is not that important, because either way
user has to be aware of the failure, then this logging needs to talk to
external service, generally a path from application -> local metrics agent ->
remote time series DB -> pager system. It's not a very much saving of effort
with this new callback.
Also for rebooting a new consumer, this consumer needs initialization configs
and so on. Where are we planning to store these configuration data? If current
consumer is already dead, who will be responsible for bringing up an
almost-the-same consumer?
Could you brainstorm more use cases other than the error logging and rebooting
here?
> Add API to allow user to define end behavior of consumer failure
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: KAFKA-8438
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-8438
> Project: Kafka
> Issue Type: New Feature
> Components: consumer
> Reporter: Richard Yu
> Priority: Major
> Labels: needs-dicussion, needs-kip
>
> Recently, in a concerted effort to make Kafka's rebalances less painful,
> various approaches has been used to reduce the number of and impact of
> rebalances. Often, the trigger of a rebalance is a failure of some sort or a
> thrown exception during processing, in which case, the workload will be
> redistributed among surviving threads. Working to reduce rebalances due to
> random consumer crashes, a recent change to Kafka internals had been made
> (which introduces the concept of static membership) that prevents a rebalance
> from occurring within {{session.timeout.ms}} in the hope that the consumer
> thread which crashed would recover in that time interval and rejoin the group.
> However, in some cases, some consumer threads would permanently go down or
> remain dead for long periods of time. In these scenarios, users of Kafka
> would possibly not be aware of such a crash until hours later after it
> happened which forces Kafka users to manually start a new KafkaConsumer
> process a considerable period of time after the failure had occurred. That is
> where the addition of a callback such as {{onConsumerFailure}} would help.
> There are multiple use cases for this callback (which is defined by the
> user). {{onConsumerFailure}} is called when a particular consumer thread goes
> under for some specified time interval (i.e. a config called
> {{acceptable.consumer.failure.timeout.ms}}). When called, this method could
> be used to log a consumer failure or should the user wish it, create a new
> thread which would then rejoin the consumer group (which could also include
> the required {{group.instance.id}} so that a rebalance wouldn't be
> re-triggered –- we would need to think about that).
> Should the old thread recover and attempt to rejoin the consumer group (with
> the substitute thread being part of the group), the old thread will be denied
> access and an exception would be thrown (to indicate that another process has
> already taken its place).
>
>
>
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