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Community Blog Everything You Need to Know about PyFlink

Everything You Need to Know about PyFlink

This article introduces PyFlink from three key aspects: basic knowledge, internals/architecture, and performance tuning tips.

PyFlink is a Python API for Apache Flink. It allows users to write Flink programs in Python and execute them on a Flink cluster.

This article introduces PyFlink from the following aspects:

  • What a basic PyFlink job looks like and basic knowledge around it
  • How PyFlink jobs work, including the high-level architecture and internals of PyFlink
  • Performance tuning tips around PyFlink
  • Future Plans

We hope readers will gain a basic understanding of PyFlink and what to do with it after reading this article.

Basically, if you have requirements of real-time computing (such as real-time ETL, real-time feature engineering, real-time data warehouse, real-time prediction, etc.), and you are familiar with Python language or want to use some handy Python libraries during the processing, it may be a good idea to try PyFlink, which connects Flink with the Python world.

PyFlink was first introduced into Flink in Flink 1.9, which dates back to 2019. In this first version, the supported functionalities were very limited. After that, the Flink community was continuously improving it. After nearly four years of development, it has become more mature. Currently, it supports most of the functionalities in Flink Java API. Besides, there are many functionalities only available in PyFlink (such as Python user-defined function support).

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Working with PyFlink

Installation

The simplest way to install PyFlink is from PyPI:

pip install apache-flink

The latest version (Flink 1.16) only supports Python 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9. Python 3.10 will be supported in the upcoming Flink 1.17.

It should be noted that if you want to execute PyFlink jobs in a Flink cluster, you should make sure PyFlink is available in all the cluster nodes. You need to preinstall it in all the cluster nodes before submitting PyFlink jobs or attach a Python virtual environment with PyFlink installed during submitting PyFlink jobs. Please see submitting PyFlink jobs for more details. The latter case is more flexible, as it means the Python environments are isolated for different jobs. This allows different PyFlink jobs to use different Python libraries and even different Python versions.

Preinstalling PyFlink in all the cluster nodes is not very friendly for users as it increases the burden on users to get started. However, this is unavoidable as there are many transitive dependencies of PyFlink (such as Apache Beam and Pandas). Besides, PyFlink is optimized via Cython, so there are native binaries. Users may not be able to simply attach the PyFlink package and all the transitive dependencies during submitting PyFlink jobs.

Besides installing from PyPI, you could build PyFlink from the source. This is useful when you want to maintain your fork of Flink or cherry-pick some bug fixes which are still not released.

Define Data Source and Sink

Flink is a distributed computing engine. It has no storage (besides the state), which is the immediate information during processing and is usually not used as the data source and sink of a Flink job. In order to create a Flink/PyFlink job, you need to define where the data you want to process comes from and where the execution results will be written (optional).

There are two levels of API in PyFlink (same as Java): Table API (relational and declarative API) and DataStream API (imperative API). It has provided separate ways to define source and sink in each API stack. Besides, in each API stack, it has provided multiple ways to define source and sink. We will give a few simple examples below:

Reading from Kafka using DataStream API:

source = KafkaSource.builder() \
    .set_bootstrap_servers("localhost:9092") \
    .set_topics("input-topic") \
    .set_group_id("my-group") \
    .set_starting_offsets(KafkaOffsetsInitializer.earliest()) \
    .set_value_only_deserializer(
        JsonRowDeserializationSchema.builder()
        .type_info(Types.ROW([Types.LONG(), Types.STRING()]))
        .build()) \
    .build()

env = StreamExecutionEnvironment.get_execution_environment()
ds = env.from_source(source, WatermarkStrategy.no_watermarks(), "Kafka Source")

Reading from Kafka using Table API:

env_settings = EnvironmentSettings.in_streaming_mode()
t_env = TableEnvironment.create(env_settings)

t_env.create_temporary_table(
    'kafka_source',
    TableDescriptor.for_connector('kafka')
        .schema(Schema.new_builder()
                .column('id', DataTypes.BIGINT())
                .column('data', DataTypes.STRING())
                .build())
        .option('properties.bootstrap.servers', 'localhost:9092')
        .option('properties.group.id', 'my-group')
        .option('topic', 'input-topic')
        .option('scan.startup.mode', 'earliest-offset')
        .option('value.format', 'json')
        .build())

table = t_env.from_path("kafka_source")

Writing to Kafka using DataStream API:

sink = KafkaSink.builder() \
    .set_bootstrap_servers('localhost:9092') \
    .set_record_serializer(
        KafkaRecordSerializationSchema.builder()
            .set_topic("topic-name")
            .set_value_serialization_schema(
                JsonRowSerializationSchema.builder()
                .with_type_info(Types.ROW([Types.LONG(), Types.STRING()]))
                .build())
            .build()
    ) \
    .set_delivery_guarantee(DeliveryGuarantee.AT_LEAST_ONCE) \
    .build()

ds.sink_to(sink)

Writing to Kafka using Table API:

env_settings = EnvironmentSettings.in_streaming_mode()
t_env = TableEnvironment.create(env_settings)

t_env.create_temporary_table(
    'kafka_sink',
    TableDescriptor.for_connector('kafka')
        .schema(Schema.new_builder()
                .column('id', DataTypes.BIGINT())
                .column('data', DataTypes.STRING())
                .build())
        .option('properties.bootstrap.servers', 'localhost:9092')
        .option('topic', 'output-topic')
        .option('value.format', 'json')
        .build())

table.execute_insert('kafka_sink')

Here are a few things worth noticing:

  • It defines the source and sink properties via key/value pairs in Table API. It follows the same pattern for all the Table API connectors. If you want to use a different connector, you need to refer to the connector for which configurations are supported. It also means that if you already have a connector that is not officially supported in Flink, you could use it in the same way as the connectors which are officially supported. The only differences between them are the configurations, which could be configured via key/value pairs.
  • Each connector has provided a stack of completely different APIs for DataStream API connectors. You need to refer to the specific connector page for which APIs are provided. Connectors officially supported in PyFlink already have such APIs provided for them. However, if you have a connector that is not officially supported, you need to provide such Python APIs yourself to use it in PyFlink. It should be very simple, as the Python API here is just a wrapping of the corresponding Java API. You could refer to how the other connectors are supported in PyFlink as examples.

Besides the usage above, there are many other ways to define source and sink. You could refer to this link for more information about Table API connectors and this link about DataStream API connectors.

It should be noted that it also supports conversion between Table API and DataStream API. This means you could define a job reading data using Table API connectors, convert it to a DataStream and write it out using DataStream API connectors, or convert it back to Table and write the results out using Table API connectors.

Transformation

After reading out the data from external storage, you could define the transformations you want to perform on the input elements. It has provided many APIs in each API stack (Table API or DataStream API).

DataStream API has provided the following functionalities:

  • map: Convert one element into another
  • flat map: Takes one element as input and produces zero, one, or more elements
  • filter: Evaluates a boolean function for each element and filter out the ones which return false
  • aggregation: Accumulating multiple elements
  • windowing: Group elements into different windows and perform calculations for each group
  • connect: Connect two different streams and allows sharing state between two streams
  • process: Similar to flat map but is more flexible as it allows access to low-level operations (such as timer and state).
  • broadcast: Broadcast one stream to all the subtasks of another stream
  • side output: In addition to the main stream, produce additional side output result stream
  • async io: This is still not supported in PyFlink.

Table API is a relational API that seems very similar to SQL. It has provided the following functionalities:

  • projection: Similar to map in DataStream API
  • filter: Similar to filter in DataStream API
  • aggregation: Similar to SQL GROUP BY, group elements on the grouping keys and perform aggregations for each group
  • window aggregation: Group elements into different windows and perform aggregations for each window
  • regular join: Similar to SQL JOIN, joins two streams
  • lookup (stream-table) join: Joins a stream with a static table
  • temporal join: Join a stream with a versioned table, similar to lookup join, however, it allows join a table at a certain point in time
  • window join: Join elements of two streams belonging to the same window
  • interval join: Join elements of two streams with a time constraint
  • topn and windowed topn: N smallest or largest values ordered by columns
  • deduplication and windowed deduplication: Removes elements that duplicate over a set of columns
  • pattern recognition: Detect elements of a specific pattern in one stream

The section above is a brief introduction to the transformations that could be performed on the data. We will not talk about the details of each functionality in this article. However, there are a few things worth noticing:

  • DataStream API vs. Table API: If you want to take fine-grained control of the transformations or need to access the low-level functionalities (such as timer and state), you should choose DataStream API. Otherwise, Table API may be a good choice in most cases.
  • It can execute SQL statements in Table API. This is useful because currently, not all the functionalities in SQL have corresponding APIs in Table (such as deduplication, pattern recognition, topn, etc.). Although there are plans to support them gradually, it may require some time. Before that, users can use SQL statements for these kinds of functionalities.
  • Flink jobs are lazily executed, and you need to call the execute API explicitly to submit them for execution. This lets you construct sophisticated programs that Flink executes as a whole. It is usually good for performance, but it may be confusing for some beginners, especially Python users who are used to exploring data in a notebook interactively.

Job Submission

Flink is a distributed compute engine that can execute Flink jobs in a standalone cluster, YARN cluster, and K8s cluster in addition to executing locally.

If you already have a PyFlink job (such as word_count.py), you could execute it locally via python word_count.py or right click and execute it in IDE. This way, it will launch a mini Flink cluster that runs in a single process to execute the PyFlink job.

It also supports submitting a PyFlink job to a remote cluster (such as a standalone cluster, YARN, K8s, etc.) via Flink’s command line tool.

This simple example shows how to execute a PyFlink job to the YARN cluster:

./bin/flink run-application -t yarn-application \
      -Djobmanager.memory.process.size=1024m \
      -Dtaskmanager.memory.process.size=1024m \
      -Dyarn.application.name=<ApplicationName> \
      -Dyarn.ship-files=/path/to/shipfiles \
      -pyarch shipfiles/venv.zip \
      -pyclientexec venv.zip/venv/bin/python3 \
      -pyexec venv.zip/venv/bin/python3 \
      -pyfs shipfiles \
      -pym word_count

More information about job submission could be referred to this link.

Debug and Logging

In the beginning, Python user-defined functions are executed in separate Python processes launched during job startup. This is not easy to debug as users have to make some changes to the Python user-defined functions to enable remote debugging.

Since Flink 1.14, it could execute Python user-defined functions in the same Python process on the client side in local mode. Users could set breakpoints in any place they want to debug (such as PyFlink framework code, Python user-defined functions, etc.). This makes debugging PyFlink jobs very easy, just like debugging any other usual Python program.

Users could also use logging inside the Python user-defined functions for debugging purposes. It should be noted that the logging messages will appear in the logging file of the TaskManagers instead of the console.

import logging

@udf(result_type=DataTypes.BIGINT())
def add(i, j):
    logging.info("i: " + i + ", j: " + j)
    return i + j

It also supports Metrics in the Python user-defined functions. This is very useful for long running programs and could be used to monitor specific statistics and configure alerts.

Handle the Dependencies

For a production job, it’s very likely that you want to refer to some third-party Python libraries. You may also need to use some connectors for which the jar files are not part of the Flink distribution. Most connectors are not bundled in Flink distribution (such as Kafka, HBase, Hive, Elasticsearch, etc.).

This may not be a big problem for programs that only need to run in a single machine. However, PyFlink jobs need to be executed in a distributed cluster. Providing an easy way to manage and distribute the dependencies across the cluster is changing but very useful. PyFlink has provided comprehensive solutions for all these kinds of dependencies.

1) Jar Files

It allows to specify the jar files as the following:

# DataStream API
env.add_jars("file:///my/jar/path/connector1.jar", "file:///my/jar/path/connector2.jar")

# Table API
t_env.get_config().set("pipeline.jars", "file:///my/jar/path/connector.jar;file:///my/jar/path/udf.jar")

Note: All the transitive dependencies should be specified. So, for connectors, it’s advised to use the fat jar whose name usually contains sql (such as flink-sql-connector-kafka-1.16.0.jar for Kafka connector instead of flink-connector-kafka-1.16.0.jar).

2) Third-Party Python Libraries

You could specify third-party Python libraries as the following:

# DataStream API
env.add_python_file(file_path)

# Table API
t_env.add_python_file(file_path)

The specified Python libraries will be distributed across all the cluster nodes and are available to use in the Python user-defined functions during execution.

3) Python Virtual Environment

If there are many Python libraries needed to be used, it may be a good practice to package the Python virtual environment together with the Python dependencies:

# Table API
t_env.add_python_archive(archive_path="/path/to/venv.zip")
t_env.get_config().set_python_executable("venv.zip/venv/bin/python3")

# DataStream API
env.add_python_archive(archive_path="/path/to/venv.zip")
env.set_python_executable("venv.zip/venv/bin/python3")

Besides API, it has provided configurations and command line options for all these kinds of dependencies to give users more flexibility.

Configuration Command Line Options
Jar Package pipeline.jars
pipeline.classpaths
--jarfile
Python libraries python.files -pyfs
Python virtual environment python.archives
python.executable
python.client.executable
-pyarch
-pyexec
-pyclientexec
Python Requirements python.requirements -pyreq

Please see the Python Dependency Management section of the PyFlink documentation for more details.

Other Tips

Besides the aspects above, there are a few other things worth noticing when developing PyFlink jobs.

Open Method for Initialization

If you have a big resource (such as a machine learning model to load in your Python user-defined function), it’s advised to load it in a special method named open. This ensures that it will only be loaded once during job initialization.

# DataStream API
class MyMapFunction(MapFunction):

    def open(self, runtime_context: RuntimeContext):
        import pickle

        with open("resources.zip/resources/model.pkl", "rb") as f:
            self.model = pickle.load(f)

    def map(self, value):
        return self.model.predict(value)


# Table API
class Predict(ScalarFunction):
    def open(self, function_context):
        import pickle

        with open("resources.zip/resources/model.pkl", "rb") as f:
            self.model = pickle.load(f)

    def eval(self, x):
        return self.model.predict(x)

predict = udf(Predict(), result_type=DataTypes.DOUBLE())

You could also refer the resources in the Python user-defined function as the following:

with open("resources.zip/resources/model.pkl", "rb") as f:
    model = pickle.load(f)

@udf(result_type=DataTypes.DOUBLE())
def predict(x):
    return mode.predict(x)

The difference between this approach and the approach above is that the loaded resource will be part of the Python user-defined function. During execution, the resource data will be serialized and distributed as part of the Python user-defined function, which may become a problem if the resource data is too huge. However, if we load the resource data in the open method, there will be no such problems.

Watermark

If event time is enabled, the calculation of some operators (such as window and pattern recognition) is triggered by watermark. If your job has no output, please check whether you have defined the watermark generator.

Usually, there are a few ways to define watermark:

  • SQL DDL: Please see the Watermark section for more details.
  • Table API: Please refer to the example for more details.
  • DataStream API: Please refer to the example for more details.

If the watermark generator is defined correctly, another common problem that may cause this issue is that there may be very little test data, and watermark isn’t advancing as expected (please see the Timely Stream Processing section on how watermark works). In this case, you could simply set the parallelism of the job to 1 or configure source idleness to work around this problem during the test phase.

If there are still no outputs after making the changes above, you could visit Flink‘s Web UI to see many detailed statistics for each operator, such as the number of input records and output records of each operator. (You may need to config pipeline.operator-chaining: false to disable the operator chain.)

Flink Web UI

If the source is unbounded, your jobs will always run. You could visit Flink's web UI on how it runs. You can see a lot of useful information from Flink’s web UI, including how long the job has run, if there are any exceptions, and the number of input/output elements of each operator (transformation).

Flink’s web UI can be accessed differently in different deployment modes:

  • Local: In this case, the port of the Flink web server is random. You could refer to the logging file (like this: /path/to/python-installation-directory/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pyflink/log/flink-dianfu-python-B-7174MD6R-1908.local.log). You will see similar messages to the following:
INFO  org.apache.flink.runtime.dispatcher.DispatcherRestEndpoint   [] - Web frontend listening at http://localhost:55969.
  • Standalone: Configured via configuration rest.port, which is 8081 by default
  • YARN: From the web UI of YARN Resource Manager, find the application corresponding to the PyFlink job and then click the link under the Tracking UI column.
  • K8s: It has provided multiple ways (ClusterIP, NodePort, and LoadBalancer) to expose Flink’s web UI (please see the documentation for more details).

PyFlink Architecture and Internals

This section introduces the architecture of PyFlink and the internal designs to help users understand how PyFlink works, especially how Python API programs are translated into Flink jobs and how the Python user-defined functions are executed.

Understanding this is helpful to answer questions like:

  • What is the difference between Python API and Java API? Which one should I use?
  • How can I use a custom connector in PyFlink?
  • Where can I find the logging messages printed in the Python user-defined functions?
  • How can I tune the performance of PyFlink jobs?

Note: We will not discuss the basic concepts in Flink (such as the architecture of Flink, stateful streaming processing, and event time and watermark) in this article. We advise users to read the official Flink documentation to understand these concepts.

Here is a diagram of the overall architecture of PyFlink. It is mainly composed of two parts:

  • Job Compiling: It’s responsible for converting a Python API program into a JobGraph.
  • Job Execution: It accepts a JobGraph and converts it into a graph of Flink operators, which run in a distributed manner.

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Architecture of PyFlink

Job Compiling

JobGraph is the protocol between a client and a Flink cluster. It contains all the necessary information to execute a job:

  • A graph of transformations that represents the processing logic users want to perform
  • The name and configurations of the job
  • Dependencies required to execute the job (such as jar files)

Currently, there is no multiple language support for JobGraph. It only supports Java representation. Generally, there are two directions to make it possible to generate a JobGraph in PyFlink recognizable by Flink cluster:

  • Refactor JobGraph and all other things around it to make it language neutral
  • Reuse the existing job compiling stack of the Java API

Considering the huge work (such as SQL parsing and query optimization), which have already been done in the Java Table API, it’s unfeasible and unnecessary to duplicate all this work in Python Table API. The community has chosen the second direction. The architecture of job compiling is listed below:

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It has leveraged Py4J, which enables Python programs running in a Python process to access the Java objects in a JVM. Methods are called as if the Java objects resided in the Python process. It has provided a corresponding Python API for each Java API, which is simply a wrapping of the Java ones. When users call one Python API in PyFlink, internally it will create a corresponding Java object in JVM and then call the corresponding API on the Java object. So, it reuses the same job compiling stack as the Java API.

This means:

  • If you use Python Table API and there are no Python user-defined functions used in your job, the performance should be the same as the Java Table API.
  • If you find there is a Java class you want to use (such as custom connectors), but it is still not supported in PyFlink, you could wrap it yourself.

Job Execution

In the previous section, we can see that Python API is simply a wrapping of the Java API. This works well for the APIs we provided. However, there are places where this doesn’t work. Let’s take a look at the following example:

source = KafkaSource.builder() \
    .set_bootstrap_servers("localhost:9092") \
    .set_topics("input-topic") \
    .set_group_id("my-group") \
    .set_starting_offsets(KafkaOffsetsInitializer.earliest()) \
    .set_value_only_deserializer(
        JsonRowDeserializationSchema.builder()
        .type_info(Types.ROW([Types.LONG(), Types.STRING()]))
        .build()) \
    .build()

env = StreamExecutionEnvironment.get_execution_environment()
ds = env.from_source(source, WatermarkStrategy.no_watermarks(), "Kafka Source")
ds.map(lambda x: x[1]).print()
env.execute()

For the example above, all the Python methods could be mapped to Flink’s Java API except ds.map(lambda x: x[1]). The reason is that, in Flink’s Java API of map, it takes a Java MapFunction as input, but lambda x: x[1] is a Python function that is not recognizable in Java API. In order to support it, during the compilation phase, we need to serialize and wrap it into a Java wrapper object and spawn a Python process to execute it during job execution.

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During execution, a Flink job is composed of a series of Flink operators. Each operator accepts inputs from upstream operators, transforms them, and produces outputs to the downstream operators. For transformations where the processing logic is Python, a specific Python operator will be generated:

  • During the initialization phase, it will spawn a Python process and send the metadata (such as the Python user-defined functions to be executed to the Python process)
  • After receiving data from upstream operators, it will send them to the Python process for execution. The data is sent to the Python process asynchronously in a pipeline manner. It will not wait to receive the execution results before sending the next ones.
  • It supports access to the state in Python user-defined functions, and the state is managed in the Python operator that runs in JVM. It is different from data communication, state access is synchronous. The state may be cached in the Python process to improve the performance.
  • It also supports the use of logging in the Python user-defined functions. The logging messages will be sent to the Python operator, which runs in JVM. As a result, it will finally appear in the log file of the TaskManagers.

The following things need to be highlighted:

  • The Python functions will be serialized during job compiling and deserialized during job execution. Please make sure that it doesn’t refer to huge resources (such as machine learning model in the Python functions). You should not use instance variables that are not serializable.
  • It will chain multiple Python functions as much as possible to avoid unnecessary serialization/deserialization overhead and communication overhead.

Thread Mode

Launching Python user-defined functions in a separate process works well in most cases, but there are also some problems:

  • It brings additional serialization/deserialization overhead and communication overhead, which may be a problem when the data size is big (such as in image processing where the image size may be very large and long strings).
  • Inter-process communication also means the latency may be higher. Besides, the Python operator usually needs to buffer data to improve the network performance, which increases the latency further.
  • Maintaining an extra process and inter-process communication means challenges for stability.

The community has introduced thread mode to overcome the problems above, which executes Python user-defined functions in JVM since Flink 1.15. It’s disabled by default, but you can enable it by setting configuration: python.execution-mode: thread.

When thread mode is enabled, Python user-defined functions will be executed in a very different manner to the process mode:

  • It processes data one row at a time, so there is extra latency.
  • There is no serialization/deserialization overhead and communication overhead anymore.

However, there are some limitations for thread mode, which is why it’s not enabled by default:

  • It only supports the CPython interpreter as it depends on the runtime of CPython to execute Python user-defined functions.
  • It doesn’t support session mode well where multiple jobs may need to use separate Python interpreters because CPython runtime can only be loaded once in a process.

You could refer to the article entitled Exploring the thread mode in PyFlink for more details about thread mode.

State Access and Checkpoint

In the previous section, we can see that it supports access state in Python user-defined functions. Here is an example that shows how to calculate the average value of each group using state:

from pyflink.common.typeinfo import Types
from pyflink.datastream import StreamExecutionEnvironment, RuntimeContext, MapFunction
from pyflink.datastream.state import ValueStateDescriptor


class Average(MapFunction):

    def __init__(self):
        self.sum_state = None
        self.cnt_state = None

    def open(self, runtime_context: RuntimeContext):
        self.sum_state = runtime_context.get_state(ValueStateDescriptor("sum", Types.INT()))
        self.cnt_state = runtime_context.get_state(ValueStateDescriptor("cnt", Types.INT()))

   def map(self, value):
        # access the state value
        sum = self.sum_state.value()
        if sum is None:
            sum = 0

        cnt = self.cnt_state.value()
        if cnt is None:
            cnt = 0

        sum += value[1]
        cnt += 1

        # update the state
        self.sum_state.update(sum)
        self.cnt_state.update(cnt)

        return value[0], sum / cnt


env = StreamExecutionEnvironment.get_execution_environment()
env.from_collection([(1, 3), (1, 5), (1, 7), (2, 4), (2, 2)]) \
   .key_by(lambda row: row[0]) \
   .map(Average()) \
   .print()

env.execute()

In the example above, both sum_state and cnt_state are state objects provided in PyFlink. It allows access to states during job execution, and the states could be recovered after job failover.

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The diagram above shows:

  • The source of the truth of state is managed in Python Operator running in JVM.
  • State access is synchronous from the perspective of the users.

It has made the following optimizations to improve the performance of state access:

  • Async Write: It has maintained an LRU cache of the latest states, and modifications of the states will be written back to the Python Operator asynchronously.
  • Lazy Read: Besides the LRU cache, it can read MapState lazily to avoid unnecessary state request

Performance Tuning

Note: The means to tune Flink, Java jobs also apply for PyFlink jobs. There are already many resources discussing this, so we will not discuss them again. This section only discusses some basic ideas to tune the performance of PyFlink jobs. More specifically, we only discuss how to tune the performance of Python operators in this section.

Memory Tuning

Python operators need to launch a separate Python process to execute Python user-defined functions. It may need to occupy a lot of memory in Python user-defined functions (such as users loading a very big machine learning model).

If the memory configured for the Python process is lower than required, it may affect the stability of the job. For example, if the job runs in K8s or YARN deployment, which restricts the memory, the Python process may crash because memory exceeds the limit.

The following configurations could be used to tune the memory of the Python process:

Bundle Size

In process mode, the Python operator sends data to the Python process in batches. It needs to buffer the data before sending them to the Python process to improve the network performance.

During the checkpoint, it needs to wait before all the buffered data is processed. There may be a lot of elements in a batch, but the processing logic in the Python user-defined functions is inefficient, so each checkpoint takes a long time. If you have observed that the checkpoint time is very long (or even fails), you could try to tune the configuration python.fn-execution.bundle.size.

Execution Mode

From the previous section, we know that thread mode may be good for performance in cases where the data size is big or when you want to get lower latency. You could simply set the configuration python.execution-mode: thread to enable it.

What’s Next in PyFlink?

Currently, the functionalities of PyFlink are mostly ready. Next, the community will spend more effort in the following areas:

  • Providing better support for interactive programming, including better support to only retrieve the few leading rows of an unbounded table
  • Improve ease of use, including making the API more Pythonic, improving the documentation, and adding more examples.
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Data Geek

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Dikky Ryan Pratama May 9, 2023 at 5:40 am

very inspiring!

Data Geek

98 posts | 4 followers

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