Nico Kruber dives into the internals of Apache Flink’s network stack:
Flink’s network stack is one of the core components that make up the
flink-runtimemodule and sit at the heart of every Flink job. It connects individual work units (subtasks) from all TaskManagers. This is where your streamed-in data flows through and it is therefore crucial to the performance of your Flink job for both the throughput as well as latency you observe. In contrast to the coordination channels between TaskManagers and JobManagers which are using RPCs via Akka, the network stack between TaskManagers relies on a much lower-level API using Netty.This blog post is the first in a series of posts about the network stack. In the sections below, we will first have a high-level look at what abstractions are exposed to the stream operators and then go into detail on the physical implementation and various optimisations Flink did. We will briefly present the result of these optimisations and Flink’s trade-off between throughput and latency. Future blog posts in this series will elaborate more on monitoring and metrics, tuning parameters, and common anti-patterns.
There’s a lot in here and it’s worth reading.