Hi! We’ve been using NiFi for a while now, and we save all provenance events for logging purposes and such. We encountered an issue while looking at lineages of some flow files, which showed drop events as if they happened before another event, that in fact preceded it (and indeed has a lower event ordinal).
For example in a split json processor, the original FlowFile is dropped after all splits happen and are assigned fragment counts, but still the timestamp of the drop event is earlier than the timestamp of the attributes modified event. That causes the graph to look as if the attributes modified event comes out of the drop event, which doesn’t really make sense to us (should it?). It’s probably worth noting that the drop event ordinal is higher than the attributes modified event ordinal. Also we noticed that 1. This only happens every once per a few thousand events. 2. This does not reproduce by replaying. 3. The drop event’s timestamp is earlier by 1ms in the cases we encountered, and the ordinal is always larger by one. This might be an error with the split json processor or a more general one. We’d love any clues or corrections to misconceptions we might have (maybe this is not a problem and drop events can precede other events?) Thank you!
