Hi,

We're running a relatively simply Flink application that uses a bunch of
state in RocksDB on Kubernetes.
During the course of development and going to production, we found that we
were often running into memory issues made apparent by Kubernetes OOMKilled
and Java OOM log events.

In order to tackle these, we're trying to account for all the memory used
in the container, to allow proper tuning.
Metric-wise we have:
- container_memory_working_set_bytes = 6,5GB
- flink_taskmanager_Status_JVM_Memory_Heap_Max =  4,7GB
- flink_taskmanager_Status_JVM_Memory_NonHeap_Used = 325MB
- flink_taskmanager_Status_JVM_Memory_Direct_MemoryUsed = 500MB

This is my understanding based on all the documentation and observations:
container_memory_working_set_bytes will be the total amount of memory in
use, disregarding OS page & block cache.
Heap will be heap.
NonHeap is mostly the metaspace.
Direct_Memory is mostly network buffers.

Running the numbers I have 1 GB unaccounted for. I'm also uncertain as to
RocksDB. According to the docs RocksDB has a "Column Family Write Buffer"
where "You need to budget for 2 x your worst case memory use".
We have 17 ValueStateDescriptors (ignoring state for windows) which I'm
assuming corresponds to a "Column Family" in RockDB. Meaning our budget
should be around 2GB.
Is this accounted for in one of the flink_taskmanager metrics above? We've
also enabled various rocksdb metrics, but it's unclear where this Write
Buffer memory would be represented.

Finally, we've seen that when our job has issues and is restarted rapidly,
NonHeap_Used grows from an initial 50Mb to 700MB, before our containers are
killed. We're assuming this is due
to no form of cleanup in the metaspace as classes get (re)loaded.

These are our taskmanager JVM settings: -XX:+UseG1GC
-XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=1G -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:+UseCGroupMemoryLimitForHeap -XX:MaxRAMFraction=2
With flink config:
      taskmanager.heap.size: 5000m
      state.backend: rocksdb
      state.backend.incremental: true
      state.backend.rocksdb.timer-service.factory: ROCKSDB

Based on what we've observed we're thinking about setting
-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize to a reasonable value, so that we at least get an
error message which can easily be traced back to the behavior we're seeing.

Okay, all that said let's sum up what we're asking here:
- Is there any more insight into how memory is accounted for than our
current metrics?
- Which metric, if any accounts for RocksDB memory usage?
- What's going on with the Metaspace growth we're seeing during job
restarts, is there something we can do about this such as setting
-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize?
- Any other tips to improve reliability running in resource constrained
environments such as Kubernetes?

Thanks,

William

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