Optimize Spark and Yarn configuration - apache-spark

Question

We have a cluster of 4 nodes with the characteristics above :
Spark jobs make a lot of times in processing, how could we optimize this time knowing that our jobs run from RStudio and we still have a lot of memory not utilized.

Answer 1

To add more context to the answer above, I would like to give explanation on how to set those parameters --num-executors, --executor-memory, --executor-cores appropriately.
The following answer covers the 3 main aspects mentioned in title - number of executors, executor memory and number of cores.
There may be other parameters like driver memory and others which I did not address as of this answer.
Case 1 Hardware - 6 Nodes, and Each node 16 cores, 64 GB RAM
Each executor is a JVM instance. So we can have multiple executors in a single Node
First 1 core and 1 GB is needed for OS and Hadoop Daemons, so available are 15 cores, 63 GB RAM for each node
Start with one by one how to choose these parameters.
Number of cores:
Number of cores = Concurrent tasks as executor can run
So we might think, more concurrent tasks for each executor will give better performance.
But research shows that any application with more than 5 concurrent tasks, would lead to bad show. So stick this to 5.
This number came from the ability of executor and not from how many cores a system has. So the number 5 stays same
even if you have double(32) cores in the CPU.
Number of executors:
Coming back to next step, with 5 as cores per executor, and 15 as total available cores in one Node(CPU) - we come to
3 executors per node.
So with 6 nodes, and 3 executors per node - we get 18 executors. Out of 18 we need 1 executor (java process) for AM in YARN we get 17 executors
This 17 is the number we give to spark using --num-executors while running from spark-submit shell command
Memory for each executor:
From above step, we have 3 executors per node. And available RAM is 63 GB
So memory for each executor is 63/3 = 21GB.
However small overhead memory is also needed to determine the full memory request to YARN for each executor.
Formula for that over head is max(384, .07 * spark.executor.memory)
Calculating that overhead - .07 * 21 (Here 21 is calculated as above 63/3)
= 1.47
Since 1.47 GB > 384 MB, the over head is 1.47.
Take the above from each 21 above => 21 - 1.47 ~ 19 GB
So executor memory - 19 GB
Final numbers - Executors - 17 per node, Cores 5 per executor, Executor Memory - 19 GB
This way, assigning the resources properly to the spark jobs in the cluster would speed up the jobs; efficiently using available resources.

Answer 2

I recommend you to have a look to these parameters :
--num-executors : controls how many executors will be allocated
--executor-memory : RAM for each executor
--executor-cores : cores for each executor