Kafka Streams: Proper way to exit on error

Question

I've been successful in getting a streams app to consume, transform and produce data, but I've noticed that periodically, the streams processor will transition to a state of ERROR and the process will sit there without exiting.

Showing me logs like:

All stream threads have died. The instance will be in error state and should be closed.

Is there a way to tell the Streams app to exit once its reached the ERROR state? Maybe a monitor thread of sorts?

I see references in the comments of the Kafka Streams code to the user needing to close the application once its reached this state, however, I haven't been able to find mention of this task in the documentation.

Is there a simple way to do this shutdown step?

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probably incorrect way to potentially close on errors

My intention was to set the UncaughtExceptionHandler method on the KafkaStreams object, to do the following:

• log the error
• shutdown the stream using the close method on the original KafkaStreams object

What results from that is:

• message for the exception is logged
• INFO org.apache.kafka.streams.KafkaStreams ... State transition from ERROR to PENDING_SHUTDOWN
• INFO org.apache.kafka.streams.processor.internals.StreamThread ... Informed to shut down

And then, unfortunately the process seems to hang without exiting.

FWIW I feel like this is probably a misuse of the setUncaughtExceptionHandler

Answer 1

Using an UncaughtExceptionHandler is correct. However, if you call KafkaStreams#close() within the handler call-back you can run into a deadlock. Thus, you should either only set a flag, and call #close() outside of the callback, or you use close() with a timeout. If the timeout expires, a shutdown is forced.