Problem:

Both the LoadBasedPartition and StickyPartition Strategy follow the StickyMulticastStrategy to assign the datastream tasks across the available instances.

In the StickyMulticastStrategy, the last step of the process is to rebalance the tasks across instances such that the number of tasks across the instances adheres to the imbalance threshold value.

Basically, the difference between the max #tasks assigned to any instance and the min #tasks assigned to any other instance should not exceed the imbalance threshold.

In the current implementation, there was a minor bug, which in some cases failed to achieve that proper rebalance. That issue causes validation failures and thus availability misses on the mirror-making service.

Failure Scenario: Observed in production service with 6 instances connected to ZK and has 538 tasks in total.

We saw from the production logs that the tasks were distributed across the instances with counts: 89, 89, 89, 89, 93, 89

And given that we enforce the imbalance threshold of 1, the actual distribution should have been something like
89, 89, 90, 90, 90, 90

In the below pasted rebalance code,

tasksTotal = 538
minTasksPerInstance = 538 / 6 = 89
And since the minimum number of tasks assigned == minTasksPerInstance, it won't go in the while loop to rebalance.

// STEP 3: Trigger rebalance if the number of different tasks more than the configured threshold

if (newAssignment.get(instancesBySize.get(instancesBySize.size() - 1)).size() - newAssignment.get(instancesBySize.get(0)).size() > _imbalanceThreshold) {
 int tasksTotal = newAssignment.values().stream().mapToInt(Set::size).sum();
 int minTasksPerInstance = tasksTotal / instances.size();

 // some rebalance to increase the task count in instances below the minTasksPerInstance
 while (newAssignment.get(instancesBySize.get(0)).size() < minTasksPerInstance) {
   ...
 }
}

Solution:

Update the rebalancing code condition to only terminate when the min #tasks assigned + the imbalance threshold is less than the max #tasks assigned.

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