Spark: rdd.count() and rdd.write() are executing transformations twice - apache-spark

I am using Apache Spark to fetch records from database and after some transformations, writing them to AWS S3. Now I also want to count the no of records I am writing to S3 and for that I am doing
rdd.count() and then
rdd.write()
In this way all the transformations are executing twice and giving performance issues.
Is there any way It can be achieved while transformations execution will not perform again?

Two Actions - the count and the write mean 2 sets of reading.
Assuming something like this:
val rdd = sc.parallelize(collectedData, 4)
then by adding .cache:
val rdd = sc.parallelize(collectedData, 4).cache
this will obviate the 2nd set of re-reading in general, but not always. You can also look at persist and the levels. Of course, caching has an overhead as well and it depends on sizes in play.
The DAG Visualization on the Spark UI will show a green segment or dot, implying caching has been applied.

Related

spark taking a long time for reading a compressed json on HDFS

I have 2 compressed jsons files (bz2) on HDFS. I have to load them in Spark. For this, first I have started pyspark (shell) and then perform following queries for this:
>> df = spark.read.load("hdfs://master:9000/data/db1/file_part*.bz2", format="json", sep=",", inferSchema="true")
[Stage 0:> (8 + 4) / 503]
As it can be seen that it is loading data. Why this is happening. According to my knowledge, spark does not perform anything before action (as it is lazy), then there are 503 stages in this case. I have to create a data frame and then convert into a tempView. After this using SQL, perform some operation of SQL. In my case, almost all setting is default.
Remaining sections of data processing are as follows:
df.createOrReplaceTempView("view1")
sqlContext.sql("select count(distinct(id)) from view1").show()
The Optimizer with DFs and such differs to that of RDD processing. It can and does sometimes launch Stages ahead of an Action now where DFs are concerned. Zipped files, inferring schema and pivots, for example.
In this case there is a case of wanting to infer schema. That is a
slow process.
You can supply the schema which will then save time.
Or use a sampling percentage when inferring is specified; then this will be faster but you run the risk of not getting the overall correct schema.

Spark SQL joining multiple tables design

I am developing a Spark SQL analytics solutions using set of tables. Suppose there are 5 tables which i need to building my solution and finally i am creating one output table.
Here is my flow
dataframe1 = table1 join table2
dataframe2 = dataframe1 join table3
dataframe3 = datamframe2 + filter + agg
dataframe4 = dataframe3 join table4 join table 5
// finally
dataframe4.saveAsTable
When I save final dataframe that's when all the above dataframe is evaluated.
Is my approach is good? or
Do i need to cache/persist intermediate dataframes?
This is a very generic question and it is hard to provide a definitive answer.
Depending on the size of tables you would want to do broadcast hint for any of tables that are relatively small.
You can do this via
table_i.join(broadcast(table_j), ....)
This behaviour depends on the value in:
Now broadcast hint will be honoured only if Spark is able to evaluate the value of the table so you might need to cache().
Another option is via Spark checkpoints that can help to truncate local plan for optimisation (also this allows you to resume jobs from checkpoint location, it is similar to writing to HDFS but with some overhead).
In case of broadcasting few houndres of Mb tables, you might need to increase your kryo buffer:
--conf spark.kryoserializer.buffer.max=1g
It also depends which join types you will use.
You would probably want to do filter and aggregagtion as early as possible since it will reduce the join surface.
There are many other considerations to be consider in order to properly optimise this. In case of power law distribution of join keys in any of the joins you would need to do salting and explode smaller table.
In your case, in principle, there is not really a cache or persist required Why?
As there are no reuse paths evident (for other Actions or other Transformations within the same Action), it is all sequential.
Also, lazy evaluation and Catalyst.
Try the .explain and see how Spark will process.
However, due to memory eviction possibilities on the Cluster, there may be the need to re-compute on a Worker. There are various settings that you could apply via .cache and .persist, but Spark handles memory and disk spills without explicit .cache or .persist. See https://sparkbyexamples.com/spark/spark-difference-between-cache-and-persist/
Also, using .cache can affect performance. So use .explain. See here an excellent posting: Spark: Explicit caching can interfere with Catalyst optimizer's ability to optimize some queries?
So, each case is different but yours seems Ok to answer as I have. In summary: An RDD or DF that is not cached, nor check-pointed, is re-evaluated again each time an Action is invoked on that RDD or DF or if re-accessed within the current Action and no skipped stage situation applies. In your case no issue. Doing otherwise would slow your App down in fact.

Lazy loading of partitioned parquet in Apache Spark

As I understand it, Apache Spark uses lazy evaluation. So for example code like the following that consists only of transformations will do no actual processing:
val transformed_df = df.filter("some_field = 10").select("some_other_field", "yet_another_field")
Only when we do an "action" will any processing actually occur:
transformed_df.show()
I had been under the impression that load operations are also lazy in spark. (See How spark loads the data into memory.)
However, my experiences with spark have not borne this out. When I do something like the following,
val df = spark.read.parquet("/path/to/parquet/")
execution seems to depend greatly on the size of the data in the path. In other words, it's not strictly lazy. This is inconvenient if the data is partitioned and I only need to look at a fraction of the partitions.
For example:
df.filter("partitioned_field = 10").show()
If the data is partitioned in storage on "partitioned_field", I would have expected spark to wait until show() is called, and then read only data under "/path/to/parquet/partitioned_field=10/". But again, this doesn't seem to be the case. Spark appears to perform at least some operations on all of the data as soon as read or load is called.
I could get around this by only loading /path/to/parquet/partitioned_field=10/ in the first place, but this is much less elegant than just calling "read" and filtering on the partitioned field, and it's harder to generalize.
Is there a more elegant preferred way to lazily load partitions of parquet data?
(To clarify, I am using Spark 2.4.3)
I think I've stumbled on an answer to my question while learning about a key distinction that is often overlooked when talking about lazy evaluation in spark.
Data is lazily evaluated, but schemas are not. So if we are reading parquet, which is a structured data type, spark does have to at least determine the schema of any files it's reading as soon as read() or load() is called. So calling read() on a large number of files will take longer than on a small number of files.
Given that partitions are part of the schema, it's less surprising to me now that spark has to look at all of the files in the path to determine the schema before filtering on a partition field.
It would be convenient for my purposes if spark were to wait until schema evaluation was strictly necessary and was able to filter on partition fields prior to determining the rest of the schema, but it sounds like this is not the case. I believe Dataset objects always must have a schema, so I'm not sure there's a way around this problem without significant changes to Spark.
In conclusion, it seems like my only option currently is to pass in a list of paths for the partitions that I need rather than the base path if I want to avoid evaluating the schema over the entire data repository.

Issues with long lineages (DAG) in Spark

We usually use Spark as processing engines for data stored on S3 or HDFS. We use Databricks and EMR platforms.
One of the issues I frequently face is when the task size grows, the job performance is degraded severely. For example, let's say I read data from five tables with different levels of transformation like (filtering, exploding, joins, etc), union subset of data from these transformations, then do further processing (ex. remove some rows based on a criteria that requires windowing functions etc) and then some other processing stages and finally save the final output to a destination s3 path. If we run this job without it takes very long time. However, if we save(stage) temporary intermediate dataframes to S3 and use this saved (on S3) dataframe for the next steps of queries, the job finishes faster. Does anyone have similar experience? Is there a better way to handle this kind of long tasks lineages other than checkpointing?
What is even more strange is for longer lineages spark throws an expected error like column not found, while the same code works if intermediate results are temporarily staged.
Writing the intermediate data by saving the dataframe, or using a checkpoint is the only way to fix it. You're probably running into an issue where the optimizer is taking a really long time to generate the plan. The quickest/most efficient way to fix this is to use localCheckpoint. This materializes a checkpoint locally.
val df = df.localCheckpoint()

Spark Streaming appends to S3 as Parquet format, too many small partitions

I am building an app that uses Spark Streaming to receive data from Kinesis streams on AWS EMR. One of the goals is to persist the data into S3 (EMRFS), and for this I am using a 2 minutes non-overlapping window.
My approaches:
Kinesis Stream -> Spark Streaming with batch duration about 60 seconds, using a non-overlapping window of 120s, save the streamed data into S3 as:
val rdd1 = kinesisStream.map( rdd => /* decode the data */)
rdd1.window(Seconds(120), Seconds(120).foreachRDD { rdd =>
val spark = SparkSession...
import spark.implicits._
// convert rdd to df
val df = rdd.toDF(columnNames: _*)
df.write.parquet("s3://bucket/20161211.parquet")
}
Here is what s3://bucket/20161211.parquet looks like after a while:
As you can see, lots of fragmented small partitions (which is horrendous for read performance)...the question is, is there any way to control the number of small partitions as I stream data into this S3 parquet file?
Thanks
What I am thinking to do, is to each day do something like this:
val df = spark.read.parquet("s3://bucket/20161211.parquet")
df.coalesce(4).write.parquet("s3://bucket/20161211_4parition.parquet")
where I kind of repartition the dataframe to 4 partitions and save them back....
It works, I feel that doing this every day is not elegant solution...
That's actually pretty close to what you want to do, each partition will get written out as an individual file in Spark. However coalesce is a bit confusing since it can (effectively) apply upstream of where the coalesce is called. The warning from the Scala doc is:
However, if you're doing a drastic coalesce, e.g. to numPartitions = 1,
this may result in your computation taking place on fewer nodes than
you like (e.g. one node in the case of numPartitions = 1). To avoid this,
you can pass shuffle = true. This will add a shuffle step, but means the
current upstream partitions will be executed in parallel (per whatever
the current partitioning is).
In Dataset's its a bit easier to persist and count to do wide evaluation since the default coalesce function doesn't take repartition as a flag for input (although you could construct an instance of Repartition manually).
Another option is to have a second periodic batch job (or even a second streaming job) that cleans up/merges the results, but this can be a bit complicated as it introduces a second moving part to keep track of.

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