Write to multiple files in parallel in Rust - multithreading

In Rust, I need to store data entries produced by multiple threads as gzip files, similar to how logging systems store data into log files and auto-rotates them as they get too big, but I need to multi-thread as much as possible. My rough idea of the process:
a callback gets data entries from multiple threads, processes them, and adds them to a queue to be stored
multiple gzip sinks pick up entries from the queue, compress and store them into gzip files
when gzip sink exceeds some number of entries, it should finish the file and start a new one
I am very new to Rust, so not sure if this is a correct "Rusty" pattern/architecture. Having a central entry queue seem like a possible bottleneck, or not? What libs or multithreading primitives would fit this task? Thanks!

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use of df.coalesce(1) in csv vs delta table

When saving to a delta table we avoid 'df.coalesce(1)' but when saving to csv or parquet we(my team) add 'df.coalesce(1)'. Is it a common practise? Why? Is it mandatory?
In most cases when I have seen df.coalesce(1) it was done to generate only one file, for example, import CSV file into Excel, or for Parquet file into the Pandas-based program. But if you're doing .coalesce(1), then the write happens via single task, and it's becoming the performance bottleneck because you need to get data from other executors, and write it.
If you're consuming data from Spark or other distributed system, having multiple files will be beneficial for performance because you can write & read them in parallel. By default, Spark writes N files into the directory where N is the number of partitions. As #pltc noticed, this may generate the big number of files that's often not desirable because you'll get performance overhead from accessing them. So we need to have a balance between the number of files and their size - for Parquet and Delta (that is based on Parquet), having the bigger files bring several performance advantages - you read less files, you can get better compression for data inside the file, etc.
For Delta specifically, having .coalesce(1) having the same problem as for other file formats - you're writing via one task. Relying on default Spark behaviour and writing multiple files is beneficial from performance point of view - each node is writing its data in parallel, but you can get too many small files (so you may use .coalesce(N) to write bigger files). For Databricks Delta, as it was correctly pointed by #Kafels, there are some optimizations that will allow to remove that .coalesce(N) and do automatic tuning achieve the best throughput (so called "Optimized Writes"), and create bigger files ("Auto compaction") - but they should be used carefully.
Overall, the topic of optimal file size for Delta is an interesting topic - if you have big files (1Gb is used by default by OPTIMIZE command), you can get better read throughput, but if you're rewriting them with MERGE/UPDATE/DELETE, then big files are bad from performance standpoint, and it's better to have smaller (16-64-128Mb) files, so you can rewrite less data.
TL;DR: it's not mandatory, it depends on the size of your dataframe.
Long answer:
If your dataframe is 10Mb, and you have 1000 partitions for example, each file would be about 10Kb. And having so many small files would reduce Spark performance dramatically, not to mention when you have too many files, you'll eventually reach OS limitation of the number of files. Any how, when your dataset is small enough, you should merge them into a couple of files by coalesce.
However, if your dataframe is 100G, technically you still can use coalesce(1) and save to a single file, but later on you will have to deal with less parallelism when reading from it.

What is the fastest way to put a large amount of data on a local file system onto a distributed store?

I have a single local directory on the order of 1 terabyte. It is made up of millions of very small text documents. If I were to iterate through each file sequentially for my ETL, it would take days. What would be the fastest way for me to perform ETL on this data, ultimately loading it onto a distributed store like hdfs or a redis cluster?
Generically: try to use several/many parallel asynchronous streams, one per file. How many will depend on several factors (number of destination endpoints, disk IO for traversing/reading data, network buffers, errors and latency...)

Using Spark to process requests

I would like to understand if the following would be a correct use case for Spark.
Requests to an application are received either on a message queue, or in a file which contains a batch of requests. For the message queue, there are currently about 100 requests per second, although this could increase. Some files just contain a few requests, but more often there are hundreds or even many thousands.
Processing for each request includes filtering of requests, validation, looking up reference data, and calculations. Some calculations reference a Rules engine. Once these are completed, a new message is sent to a downstream system.
We would like to use Spark to distribute the processing across multiple nodes to gain scalability, resilience and performance.
I am envisaging that it would work like this:
Load a batch of requests into Spark as as RDD (requests received on the message queue might use Spark Streaming).
Separate Scala functions would be written for filtering, validation, reference data lookup and data calculation.
The first function would be passed to the RDD, and would return a new RDD.
The next function would then be run against the RDD output by the previous function.
Once all functions have completed, a for loop comprehension would be run against the final RDD to send each modified request to a downstream system.
Does the above sound correct, or would this not be the right way to use Spark?
Thanks
We have done something similar working on a small IOT project. we tested receiving and processing around 50K mqtt messages per second on 3 nodes and it was a breeze. Our processing included parsing of each JSON message, some manipulation of the object created and saving of all the records to a time series database.
We defined the batch time for 1 second, the processing time was around 300ms and RAM ~100sKB.
A few concerns with streaming. Make sure your downstream system is asynchronous so you wont get into memory issue. Its True that spark supports back pressure, but you will need to make it happen. another thing, try to keep the state to minimal. more specifically, your should not keep any state that grows linearly as your input grows. this is extremely important for your system scalability.
what impressed me the most is how easy you can scale with spark. with each node we added we grew linearly in the frequency of messages we could handle.
I hope this helps a little.
Good luck

Spark: How to read & write temporary files?

I need to write a Spark app that uses temporary files.
I need to download many many large files, read them with some legacy code, do some processing, delete the file, and write the results to a database.
The files are on S3 and take a long time to download. However, I can do many at once, so I want to download a large number in parallel. The legacy code reads from the file system.
I think I can not avoid creating temporary files. What are the rules about Spark code reading and writing local files?
This must be a common issue, but I haven't found any threads or docs that talk about it. Can someone give me a pointer?
Many thanks
P

Does Oracle sqlldr process multiple INFILE in parallel

I am using sqlldr to load data into Oracle RAC (on Linux), and I am trying to improve the performance of my data loading. I am using 'Direct Path' and I've set 'parallel=true' for the sqlldr. Moreover, since my servers are multi-core, multithreading is set to be true by default.
Now, I am thinking about splitting the input file, on each server, into several chunks, and load them in parallel. I learned that one can list multiple INFILE files in the control file for sqlldr. My question is:
if I list several INFILE files in a single control file, and launch one sqlldr instance, does it process the files in parallel, or goes through them sequentially ?
Because another option for me is to launch, in parallel, as many sqlldr instances as the number of chunks that I create on each server, while each sqlldr instance has its own control file that lists only one INFILE file. But this option only makes sense, if sqlldr processes multiple INFILE files sequentially.
Since you are using "direct load" you cannot parallelize it.
Direct load "locks" the high water mark of the table / partition, and puts the data there... therefore - another process cannot lock it in parallel. A parallel process would have to wait for the current load to finish.
(I assume you don't control the partitions you load into.. if you can control it - you can get a better grain-fined tuning for it.. but usually the data to load is not divided in files as it will be in partitions, if you use partitions at all...)
If you'll "give up that", the parallel would be managed "automagically" for you by the parameters you give..
BUT - I would recommend you to stay with the "direct load" since it is probably much much faster than any other method of loading that exist (although its lock is very "big" for it).

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