Kafka UNKNOWN_PRODUCER_ID exception - apache-kafka

Question

I sometimes find UNKNOWN_PRODUCER_ID exception when using kafka streams.
2018-06-25 10:31:38.329 WARN 1 --- [-1-1_0-producer] o.a.k.clients.producer.internals.Sender : [Producer clientId=default-groupz-7bd94946-3bc0-4400-8e73-7126b9b9c0d4-StreamThread-1-1_0-producer, transactionalId=default-groupz-1_0] Got error produce response with correlation id 1996 on topic-partition default-groupz-mplat-five-minute-stat-urlCount-counts-store-changelog-0, retrying (2147483646 attempts left). Error: UNKNOWN_PRODUCER_ID
Referred to official documents:
This exception is raised by the broker if it could not locate the
producer metadata associated with the producerId in question. This
could happen if, for instance, the producer's records were deleted
because their retention time had elapsed. Once the last records of the
producerId are removed, the producer's metadata is removed from the
broker, and future appends by the producer will return this exception.
It says one possibility is that a producer is idle for more than retention time (by default a week) so the producer's metadata will be removed from broker. Are there any other reasons that brokers could not locate producer metadata?

Answer 1

You might be experiencing https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-7190. As it says in that ticket:
When a streams application has little traffic, then it is possible that consumer purging would delete
even the last message sent by a producer (i.e., all the messages sent by
this producer have been consumed and committed), and as a result, the broker
would delete that producer's ID. The next time when this producer tries to
send, it will get this UNKNOWN_PRODUCER_ID error code, but in this case,
this error is retriable: the producer would just get a new producer id and
retries, and then this time it will succeed.
This issue is also being tracked at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-360%3A+Improve+handling+of+unknown+producer

Answer 2

Two reasons might delete your producer's metadata:
The log segments are deleted due to hitting retention time.
The producer state might get expired due to inactivity which is controlled by the setting transactional.id.expiration.ms which defaults to 7 days
So if your Kafka is < 2.4 you can workaround this by increasing the retention time(considering that your system allows that) of your topic's log(e.g 30 days) and to increase the transactional.id.expiration.ms setting( to 24 days) until KIP-360 is released:
log.retention.hours=720
transactional.id.expiration.ms=2073600000
This shall guarantee that for low-traffic topics(messages written rarely than 7 days), your producer's metadata state will remain stored in broker's memory for a longer period, thus decreasing the risk of getting UnknownProducerIdException.