Kafka connector- cannot stop rebalancing

Question

I am using kafka connector confluent 3.0.1 version.I create a new group named new-group and there are about 20 topics on it.most of these topics is busy.But It is a pity that when I start the connector framework , the system cannot stop rebalanceing , about 2 minute a rebalance for all topics. I don't know the reason. Some of the error message is :

[2017-01-03 21:43:57,718] ERROR Commit of WorkerSinkTask{id=new-connector-0} offsets threw an unexpected exception:  (org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask:180)
org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.CommitFailedException: Commit cannot be completed since the group has already rebalanced and assigned the partitions to another member. This means that the time between subsequent calls to poll() was longer than the configured session.timeout.ms, which typically implies that the poll loop is spending too much time message processing. You can address this either by increasing the session timeout or by reducing the maximum size of batches returned in poll() with max.poll.records.
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerCoordinator$OffsetCommitResponseHandler.handle(ConsumerCoordinator.java:578)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerCoordinator$OffsetCommitResponseHandler.handle(ConsumerCoordinator.java:519)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator$CoordinatorResponseHandler.onSuccess(AbstractCoordinator.java:679)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator$CoordinatorResponseHandler.onSuccess(AbstractCoordinator.java:658)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.RequestFuture$1.onSuccess(RequestFuture.java:167)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.RequestFuture.fireSuccess(RequestFuture.java:133)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.RequestFuture.complete(RequestFuture.java:107)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerNetworkClient$RequestFutureCompletionHandler.onComplete(ConsumerNetworkClient.java:426)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient.poll(NetworkClient.java:278)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerNetworkClient.clientPoll(ConsumerNetworkClient.java:360)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerNetworkClient.poll(ConsumerNetworkClient.java:224)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerNetworkClient.poll(ConsumerNetworkClient.java:192)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerNetworkClient.poll(ConsumerNetworkClient.java:163)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerCoordinator.commitOffsetsSync(ConsumerCoordinator.java:404)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.KafkaConsumer.commitSync(KafkaConsumer.java:1058)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.doCommit(WorkerSinkTask.java:247)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.commitOffsets(WorkerSinkTask.java:293)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.closePartitions(WorkerSinkTask.java:421)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.access$1100(WorkerSinkTask.java:54)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask$HandleRebalance.onPartitionsRevoked(WorkerSinkTask.java:465)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerCoordinator.onJoinPrepare(ConsumerCoordinator.java:283)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator.ensureActiveGroup(AbstractCoordinator.java:212)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.ConsumerCoordinator.ensurePartitionAssignment(ConsumerCoordinator.java:345)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.KafkaConsumer.pollOnce(KafkaConsumer.java:977)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.KafkaConsumer.poll(KafkaConsumer.java:937)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.pollConsumer(WorkerSinkTask.java:305)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.poll(WorkerSinkTask.java:222)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.iteration(WorkerSinkTask.java:170)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerSinkTask.execute(WorkerSinkTask.java:142)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerTask.doRun(WorkerTask.java:140)
        at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.WorkerTask.run(WorkerTask.java:175)
        at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:511)
        at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:266)
        at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1142)
        at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:617)
:

I don't know if it has anything to do with the continuous rebalance.

I know that if the KafkaConsumer.poll() is longer that the configured timeout , the kafka will revoke the partition and thus the re-balance is triggered,but I am quite sure that poll of each time is not that long. Anybody can give me some clues?

Answer 1

I think max.poll.records can solve this.It is to tune the number of records that must be handled on every loop iteration. In 0.10 there is max.poll.records, which places an upper bound on the number of records returned from each call.

Also as per Confluent, consumer.poll() should have fairly high session timeout for example 30 to 60 seconds.

You might also want to fine tune:

session.timeout.ms
heartbeat.interval.ms 
max.partition.fetch.bytes

Answer 2

Consider upgrading to 0.10.1 or higher because the consumer was enhanced in these releases to better handle longer periods between calls to poll().

You can increase the new max.poll.interval.ms parameter if you are taking more than 5 minutes to put the results into HDFS. This will stop your consumer from being kicked out of the consumer group for not making progress.

In the 0.10.1 release notes it says

The new Java Consumer now supports heartbeating from a background thread. There is a new configuration max.poll.interval.ms which controls the maximum time between poll invocations before the consumer will proactively leave the group (5 minutes by default). The value of the configuration request.timeout.ms must always be larger than max.poll.interval.ms because this is the maximum time that a JoinGroup request can block on the server while the consumer is rebalancing, so we have changed its default value to just above 5 minutes. Finally, the default value of session.timeout.ms has been adjusted down to 10 seconds, and the default value of max.poll.records has been changed to 500.