Managing spill files in greenplum - database-administration

In greenplum, we know the spill files are generated when the memory threshold exceeds, but are these spill files temporary or permanent and how do we get rid of these after our query is over? Is is automatic or we need to remove these files
And what is the size of each spill file

Related

Apache Spark loads the entire partition into memory?

Apache Spark loads the entire partition into memory or does it load gradually? Is there any reference (preferably official) about that?
If I have a large partition will be necessary to have the partition size in memory available?
Will loading data from the in-memory partition depend on the type of transformation?
That depends of your file type, if it is CSV/textFile spark usually will load gradually even if you have multiple partitions and it depends of the size of the files. CSV does that because you cannot split by which data you need to read. CSV/textFile to get one row of data you need to scan the whole file.
If we are talking about parquet or orc files the format is naturally splittable. The data will never load the full files if you put some conditions during the read as where and select to choose the columns. That is why the recommended file size is around 1GB to optimise the spark time processing.
So if you are using parquet, each partition of spark should be able to be stored in memory while the process is going. Spark will try to store most partitions it can in the memory of the cluster during the transformations you are doing, if that cannot be fitted that will spill to the disk, reducing the execution time but ensure your execution to finish.

Process multiple small files of total size 100GB in HDFS

I have a requirement in my project to process multiple .txt message files using PySpark. The files are moved from local dir to HDFS path (hdfs://messageDir/..) using batches and for every batch, i could see a few thousand .txt files and their total size is around 100GB. Almost all of the files are less than 1 MB.
May i know how HDFS stores these files and perform splits? Because every file is less than 1 MB (less than HDFS block size of 64/128MB), I dont think any split would happen but the files will be replicated and stored in 3 different data nodes.
When i use Spark to read all the files inside the HDFS directory (hdfs://messageDir/..) using wild card matching like *.txt as below:-
rdd = sc.textFile('hdfs://messageDir/*.txt')
How does Spark read the files and perform Partition because HDFS doesn't have any partition for these small files.
What if my file size increases over a period of time and get 1TB volume of small files for every batch? Can someone tell me how this can be handled?
I think you are mixing things up a little.
You have files sitting in HDFS. Here, Blocksize is the important factor. Depending on your configuration, a block normally has 64MB or 128MB. Thus, each of your 1MB files, take up 64MB in HDFS. This is aweful lot of unused space. Can you concat these TXT-files together? Otherwise you will run out of HDFS blocks, really quick. HDFS is not made to store a large amount of small files.
Spark can read files from HDFS, Local, MySQL. It cannot control the storage principles used there. As Spark uses RDDs, they are partitioned to get part of the data to the workers. The number of partitions can be checked and controlled (using repartition). For HDFS reading, this number is defined by the number of files and blocks.
Here is a nice explanation on how SparkContext.textFile() handles Partitioning and Splits on HDFS: How does Spark partition(ing) work on files in HDFS?
You can read from spark even files are small. Problem is HDFS. Usually HDFS block size is really large(64MB, 128MB, or more bigger), so many small files make name node overhead.
If you want to make more bigger file, you need to optimize reducer. Number of write files is determined by how many reducer will write. You can use coalesce or repartition method to control it.
Another way is make one more step that merge files. I wrote spark application code that coalesce. I put target record size of each file, and application get total number of records, then how much number of coalesce can be estimated.
You can use Hive or otherwise.

How do you avoid breaking active Hive/Presto queries while substituting compacted files for small files in HDFS?

We have 100s of HDFS partitions that we write to each hour of the day. The partitions are per day to make loading into Hive straight-forward, and the data is written in Parquet format.
The issue we run into is that because we want to get the data queryable as fast as possible, the hourly writing results in lots of small files.
There are plenty of examples such as How to combine small parquet files to one large parquet file? for the combining code; my question is how do you avoid breaking people's active queries while moving/substituting in the newly compacted files for the small ones?
The metastore has a filesystem location for each partition. This location is often based on the table and partition:
hdfs://namenode/data/web/request_logs/ds=2018-05-03
However, the location can be completely arbitrary, so you can utilize this to implement snapshot isolation or versioning. When you compact the files in the partition, write the new files into a new location:
hdfs://namenode/data/web/request_logs/v2_ds=2018-05-03
After the compaction is done, update the partition location in the metastore to point to the new location. Finally, cleanup the old location sometime in the future after no queries are using it.

Spill to disk and shuffle write spark

I'm getting confused about spill to disk and shuffle write. Using the default Sort shuffle manager, we use an appendOnlyMap for aggregating and combine partition records, right? Then when execution memory fill up, we start sorting map, spilling it to disk and then clean up the map for the next spill(if occur), my questions are :
What is the difference between spill to disk and shuffle write? They consist basically in creating file on local file system and also record.
Admit are different, so Spill records are sorted because the are passed through the map, instead shuffle write records no because they don't pass from the map.
I have the idea that the total size of the spilled file, should be equal to the size of the Shuffle write, maybe I'm missing something, please help to understand that phase.
Thanks.
Giorgio
spill to disk and shuffle write are two different things
spill to disk - Data move from Host RAM to Host Disk - is used when there is no enough RAM on your machine, and it place part of its RAM into disk
http://spark.apache.org/faq.html
Does my data need to fit in memory to use Spark?
No. Spark's operators spill data to disk if it does not fit in memory,
allowing it to run well on any sized data. Likewise, cached datasets
that do not fit in memory are either spilled to disk or recomputed on
the fly when needed, as determined by the RDD's storage level.
shuffle write - Data move from Executor(s) to another Executor(s) - is used when data needs to move between executors (e.g. due to JOIN, groupBy, etc)
more data can be found here:
https://0x0fff.com/spark-architecture-shuffle/
http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2015/05/working-with-apache-spark-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-shuffle/
An edge case example which might help clearing this issue:
You have 10 executors
Each executor with 100GB RAM
Data size is 1280MB, and is partitioned into 10 partitions
Each executor holds 128MB of data.
Assuming that the data holds one key, Performing groupByKey, will bring all the data into one partition. Shuffle size will be 9*128MB (9 executors will transfer their data into the last executor), and there won't be any spill to disk as the executor has 100GB of RAM and only 1GB of data
Regarding AppendOnlyMap :
As written in the AppendOnlyMap code (see above) - this function is
a low level implementation of a simple open hash table optimized for
the append-only use case, where keys are never removed, but the value
for each key may be changed.
The fact that two different modules uses the same low-level function doesn't mean that those functions are related in hi-level.

Need less parquet files

I am doing the following process
rdd.toDF.write.mode(SaveMode.Append).partitionBy("Some Column").parquet(output_path)
However, under each partition, there are too many parquet files and each of them, the size is very small, that will makes my following steps become very slow to load all the parquet files. Is there a better way that under each partition, make less parquet files and increase the single parquet file size?
You can repartition before save:
rdd.toDF.repartition("Some Column").write.mode(SaveMode.Append).partitionBy("Some Column")
I used to have this problem.
Actually you can't control the partition of files because it depends on the executor doing.
The way to work around it is using method coalesce to make a shuffle and you can make how many partition you want but it's not efficient way you also need to set driver memory enough to handle this operation.
df = df.coalesce(numPartitions).write.partitionBy(""yyyyy").parquet("xxxx")
I also faced this issue. The problem is if you use coalesce each partition gets same number of parquet files. Now different partitions have different size so ideally I need different coalesce for each partition.
It's going to be really quite expensive if you open a lot of small files. Let's say you open 1k files and each filesize are far from the value of your parquet.block.size.
Here are my suggestions:
Create a job that will first merge your input parquet files to have smaller number of files where their sizes are near or equal to parquet.block.size. The default block size for 128Mb, though it's configurable by updating parquet.block.size. Spark would love if your parquet file is near before or equal the value of your parquet.block.size. The block size is the size of a row group being buffered in memory.
Or update your spark job to just read limited number of files
Or if you have a big machine and/or resources, just do the right tuning.
Hive query has a way to merge small files into larger one. This is not available in spark sql. Also, reducing spark.sql.shuffle.partitions wont help with Dataframe API.
I tried below solution and it generated lesser number of parquet files(from 800 parquet files to 29).
Suppose the data is loaded to a dataframe df
Create a temporary table in hive.
df.createOrReplaceTempView("tempTable")
spark.sql("CREATE TABLE test_temp LIKE test")
spark.sql("INSERT INTO TABLE test_temp SELECT * FROM tempTable")
The test_temp will contain small parquet files.
Populate final hive table from temporary table
spark.sql("INSERT INTO test SELECT * FROM test_temp")
The final table will contain lesser files. Drop temporary table after populating final table.

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