Deadlock when many spark jobs are concurrently scheduled - apache-spark

Question

Using spark 2.4.4 running in YARN cluster mode with the spark FIFO scheduler.
I'm submitting multiple spark dataframe operations (i.e. writing data to S3) using a thread pool executor with a variable number of threads. This works fine if I have ~10 threads, but if I use hundreds of threads, there appears to be a deadlock, with no jobs being scheduled according to the Spark UI.
What factors control how many jobs can be scheduled concurrently? Driver resources (e.g. memory/cores)? Some other spark configuration settings?
EDIT:
Here's a brief synopsis of my code
ExecutorService pool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(nThreads);
ExecutorCompletionService<Void> ecs = new ExecutorCompletionService<>(pool);
Dataset<Row> aHugeDf = spark.read.json(hundredsOfPaths);
List<Future<Void>> futures = listOfSeveralHundredThings
.stream()
.map(aThing -> ecs.submit(() -> {
df
.filter(col("some_column").equalTo(aThing))
.write()
.format("org.apache.hudi")
.options(writeOptions)
.save(outputPathFor(aThing));
return null;
}))
.collect(Collectors.toList());
IntStream.range(0, futures.size()).forEach(i -> ecs.poll(30, TimeUnit.MINUTES));
exec.shutdownNow();
At some point, as nThreads increases, spark no longer seems to be scheduling any jobs as evidenced by:
ecs.poll(...) timing out eventually
The Spark UI jobs tab showing no active jobs
The Spark UI executors tab showing no active tasks for any executor
The Spark UI SQL tab showing nThreads running queries with no running job ID's
My execution environment is
AWS EMR 5.28.1
Spark 2.4.4
Master node = m5.4xlarge
Core nodes = 3x rd5.24xlarge
spark.driver.cores=24
spark.driver.memory=32g
spark.executor.memory=21g
spark.scheduler.mode=FIFO

Answer 1

If possible write the output of the jobs to AWS Elastic MapReduce hdfs (to leverage on the almost instantaneous renames and better file IO of local hdfs) and add a dstcp step to move the files to S3, to save yourself all the troubles of handling the innards of an object store trying to be a filesystem. Also writing to local hdfs will allow you to enable speculation to control runaway tasks without falling into the deadlock traps associated with DirectOutputCommiter.
If you must use S3 as the output directory ensure that the following Spark configurations are set
spark.hadoop.mapreduce.fileoutputcommitter.algorithm.version 2
spark.speculation false
Note: DirectParquetOutputCommitter is removed from Spark 2.0 due to the chance of data loss. Unfortunately until we have improved consistency from S3a we have to work with the workarounds. Things are improving with Hadoop 2.8
Avoid keynames in lexicographic order. One could use hashing/random prefixes or reverse date-time to get around.The trick is to name your keys hierarchically, putting the most common things you filter by on the left side of your key. And never have underscores in bucket names due to DNS issues.
Enabling fs.s3a.fast.upload upload parts of a single file to Amazon S3 in parallel
Refer these articles for more detail-
Setting spark.speculation in Spark 2.1.0 while writing to s3
https://medium.com/#subhojit20_27731/apache-spark-and-amazon-s3-gotchas-and-best-practices-a767242f3d98

Answer 2

IMO you're likely approaching this problem wrong. Unless you can guarantee that the number of tasks per job is very low, you're likely not going to get much performance improvement by parallelizing 100s of jobs at once. Your cluster can only support 300 tasks at once, assuming you're using the default parallelism of 200 thats only 1.5 jobs. I'd suggest rewriting your code to cap max concurrent queries at 10. I highly suspect that you have 300 queries with only a single task of several hundred actually running. Most OLTP data processing system intentionally have a fairly low level of concurrent queries compared to more traditional RDS systems for this reason.
also
Apache Hudi has a default parallelism of several hundred FYI.
Why don't you just partition based on your filter column?

Answer 3

I would start by eliminating possible causes. Are you sure its spark that is not able to submit many jobs? Is it spark or is it YARN? If it is the later, you might need to play with the YARN scheduler settings. Could it be something to do with ExecutorService implementation that may have some limitation for the scale you are trying to achieve? Could it be hudi? With the snippet thats hard to determine.
How does the problem manifest itself other than no jobs starting up? Do you see any metrics / monitoring on the cluster or any logs that point to the problem as you say it?
If it is to do with scaling, is is possible for you to autoscale with EMR flex and see if that works for you?
How many executor cores?
Looking into these might help you narrow down or perhaps confirm the issue - unless you have already looked into these things.
(I meant to add this as comment rather than answer but text too long for comment)

Answer 4

Using threads or thread pools are always problematic and error prone.
I had similar problem in processing spark jobs in one of Internet of things application. I resolved using fair scheduling.
Suggestions :
Use fair scheduling (fairscheduler.xml) instead of yarn capacity scheduler
how to ? see this by using dedicated resource pools one per module. when used it will look like below spark ui
See that unit of parllelism (number of partitions ) are correct for data frames you use by seeing spark admin ui. This is spark native way of using parllelism.