FlowFileAccessExceptions in NiFi and generally strange behaviour in NiFi

Glenn McCall

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Feb 15, 2017, 6:41:49 PM2/15/17

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Our system was partitioned so that the root file system only had 30GB (25 of which were consumed by "stuff"). /opt was on the root file system.

The default installation for NiFi is to store flow file repository and flow file repository are in /opt/nifi/data/xxxx_repository (i.e. on the 30GB file system of which less than 5 were free).

Eventually (unbeknownst to us) the root file system filled up resulting in odd behaviour in our NiFi flows. We discovered errors such as this in our NiFi logs.

org.apache.nifi.processor.exception.FlowFileAccessException: Could not write to StandardFlowFileRecord[uuid=57a8e4f9-f258-4758-9b8c-d55fee1a1f9d,claim=,offset=0,name=hit_data.tsv,size=0]: org.apache.nifi.processor.exception.FlowFileAccessException: Could not write to StandardFlowFileRecord[uuid=57a8e4f9-f258-4758-9b8c-d55fee1a1f9d,claim=,offset=0,name=hit_data.tsv,size=0]

These errors (which IMHO is not immediately obvious from the exception) were caused by the fact that there was no free space on the root file system. We were also following some false leads relating to security and permissions as we had also been grappling with "pemissions errors" due to Ranger being deployed at the same time.

The solution is to check your NiFi configuration (/opt/nifi/current/conf/nifi.properties) and adjust the following two properties to a file system with more free space.

nifi.flowfile.repository.directory=/opt/nifi/data/flowfile_repository

nifi.content.repository.directory.default=/opt/nifi/data/content_repository

We also copied the subdirectories in /opt/nifi/data/flowfile_repository and /opt/nifi/data/content_repository to our new location.

matt-hutton

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Feb 17, 2017, 9:35:09 PM2/17/17

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Glenn- There's an old but mostly relevant best practices article for configuring NiFi repositories: HDF/NIFI Best practices for setting up a high performance NiFi installation

Jagrut Sharma

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Feb 20, 2017, 4:30:38 PM2/20/17

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One useful resource is the NiFi System Administration Guide. Particularly, check out the System Properties section (https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/administration-guide.html#system_properties) to identify the knobs available for controlling NiFi run.