Kafka INVALID_FETCH_SESSION_EPOCH - apache-kafka

Question

We are using a kafka broker setup with a kafka streams application that runs using Spring cloud stream kafka. Although it seems to run fine, we do get the following error statements in our log:
2019-02-21 22:37:20,253 INFO kafka-coordinator-heartbeat-thread | anomaly-timeline org.apache.kafka.clients.FetchSessionHandler [Consumer clientId=anomaly-timeline-56dc4481-3086-4359-a8e8-d2dae12272a2-StreamThread-1-consumer, groupId=anomaly-timeline] Node 2 was unable to process the fetch request with (sessionId=1290440723, epoch=2089): INVALID_FETCH_SESSION_EPOCH.
I searched the internet but there is not much information on this error. I guessed that it could have something to do with a difference in time settings between the broker and the consumer, but both machines have the same timeserver settings.
Any idea how this can be resolved?

Answer 1

There is a concept of fetch session, introduced within KIP-227 since 1.1.0 release: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-227%3A+Introduce+Incremental+FetchRequests+to+Increase+Partition+Scalability
Kafka brokers, which are replica followers, fetch messages from the leader. In order to avoid sending full metadata each time for all partitions, only those partitions which changed are sent within the same fetch session.
When we look into Kafka's code, we can see an example, when this is returned:
if (session.epoch != expectedEpoch) {
info(s"Incremental fetch session ${session.id} expected epoch $expectedEpoch, but " +
s"got ${session.epoch}. Possible duplicate request.")
new FetchResponse(Errors.INVALID_FETCH_SESSION_EPOCH, new FetchSession.RESP_MAP, 0, session.id)
} else {
src: https://github.com/axbaretto/kafka/blob/ab2212c45daa841c2f16e9b1697187eb0e3aec8c/core/src/main/scala/kafka/server/FetchSession.scala#L493
In general, if you don't have thousands of partitions and, at the same time, this doesn't happen very often, then it shouldn't worry you.

Answer 2

It seems as this might be caused by Kafka-8052 issue, which was fixed for Kafka 2.3.0

Answer 3

Indeed, you can have this message when rolling or retention-based deletion occurs, as zen pointed out in comments. It's not a problem if it doesn't happen all the time. If it does, check your log.roll and log.retention configurations.

Answer 4

Updating the client version to 2.3 (same version from broker) fix it for me.

Answer 5

In our case, The root cause was kafka Broker - client incompatibility. If your cluster is behind the client version you might see all kinds of odd problems such as this.
Our kafka broker is on 1.x.x and our kafka-consumer was on 2.x.x. As soon as we downgraded our spring-cloud-dependencies to Finchley.RELEASE our problem was solved.
dependencyManagement {
imports {
mavenBom "org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-dependencies:Finchley.RELEASE"
}
}