How does spark behave without enough memory (RAM) to create RDD - apache-spark

When I do sc.textFile("abc.txt")
Spark creates RDD in RAM (memory).
So does the cluster collective memory should be greater than size of the file “abc.txt”?
My worker nodes have disk space so could I use disk space while reading texfile to create RDD? If so how to do it?
How to work on big data which doesn’t fit into memory?

When I do sc.textFile("abc.txt") Spark creates RDD in RAM (memory).
The above point is not certainly true. In Spark, their is something called transformations and something called actions. sc.textFile("abc.txt") is transformation operation and it does not simply load data straight away unless you trigger any action eg count().
To give you a collective answer to your all questions, I would urge you to understand how spark execution works. Their is something called logical and physical plans.As part of physical plan, it does cost calculation(available resource calculation across the cluster(s)) before it starts the jobs. if you understand them, you will get clear idea on all your questions.

You first assumption is incorrect:
Spark creates RDD in RAM (memory).
Spark doesn't create RDDs "in-memory". It uses memory but it is not limited to in-memory data processing. So:
So does the cluster collective memory should be greater than size of the file “abc.txt”?
No
My worker nodes have disk space so could I use disk space while reading texfile to create RDD? If so how to do it?
No special steps are required.
How to work on big data which doesn’t fit into memory?
See above.

Related

Repartitioning of large dataset in spark

I have 20TB file and I want to repartition it in spark with each partition = 128MB.
But after calculating n=20TB/128mb= 156250 partitions.
I believe 156250 is a very big number for
df.repartition(156250)
how should I approach repartitiong in this?
or should I increase the block size from 128mb to let's say 128gb.
but 128 gb per task will explode executor.
Please help me with this.
Divide and conquer it. You don’t need to load all the dataset in one place cause it would cost you huge amount resources and also network pressure because of shuffle exchanging.
The block size that you are referring to here is an HDFS concept related to storing the data by breaking it into chunks (say 128M default) & replicating thereafter for fault tolerance. In case you are storing your 20TB file on HDFS, it will automatically be broken into 20TB/128mb=156250 chunks for storage.
Coming to the Spark dataframe repartition, firstly it is a tranformation rather than an action (more information on the differences between the two: https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/rdd-programming-guide.html#rdd-operations). Which means merely calling this function on the dataframe does nothing unless the dataframe is eventually used in some action.
Further, the repartition value allows you to define the parallelism level of your operation involving the dataframe & should mostly be though upon in those terms rather than the amount of data being processed per executor. The aim should be to maximize parallelism as per the available resources rather than trying to process certain amount of data per executor. The only exception to this rule should be in cases where the executor either needs to persist all this data in memory or collect some information from this data which is proportional to the data size being processed. And the same applies to any executor task running on 128GB of data.

How can Spark process data that is way larger than Spark storage?

Currently taking a course in Spark and came across the definition of an executor:
Each executor will hold a chunk of the data to be processed. This
chunk is called a Spark partition. It is a collection of rows that
sits on one physical machine in the cluster. Executors are responsible
for carrying out the work assigned by the driver. Each executor is
responsible for two things: (1) execute code assigned by the driver,
(2) report the state of the computation back to the driver
I am wondering what will happen if the storage of the spark cluster is less than the data that needs to be processed? How executors will fetch the data to sit on the physical machine in the cluster?
The same question goes for streaming data, which unbound data. Do Spark save all the incoming data on disk?
The Apache Spark FAQ briefly mentions the two strategies Spark may adopt:
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.
Although Spark uses all available memory by default, it could be configured to run the jobs only with disk.
In section 2.6.4 Behavior with Insufficient Memory of Matei's PhD dissertation on Spark (An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters) benchmarks the performance impact due to the reduced amount of memory available.
In practice, you don't usually persist the source dataframe of 100TB, but only the aggregations or intermediate computations that are reused.

setting tuning parameters of a spark job

I'm relatively new to spark and I have a few questions related to the tuning optimizations with respect to the spark submit command.
I have followed : How to tune spark executor number, cores and executor memory?
and I understand how to utilise maximum resources out of my spark cluster.
However, I was recently asked how to define the number of cores, memory and cores when I have a relatively smaller operation to do as if I give maximum resources, it is going to be underutilised .
For instance,
if I have to just do a merge job (read files from hdfs and write one single huge file back to hdfs using coalesce) for about 60-70 GB (assume each file is of 128 mb in size which is the block size of HDFS) of data(in avro format without compression), what would be the ideal memory, no of executor and cores required for this?
Assume I have the configurations of my nodes same as the one mentioned in the link above.
I can't understand the concept of how much memory will be used up by the entire job provided there are no joins, aggregations etc.
The amount of memory you will need depends on what you run before the write operation. If all you're doing is reading data combining it and writing it out, then you will need very little memory per cpu because the dataset is never fully materialized before writing it out. If you're doing joins/group-by/other aggregate operations all of those will require much ore memory. The exception to this rule is that spark isn't really tuned for large files and generally is much more performant when dealing with sets of reasonably sized files. Ultimately the best way to get your answers is to run your job with the default parameters and see what blows up.

Does Apache Spark cache RDD in node-level or cluster-level?

I know that Apache Spark persist method saves RDDs in memory and that if there is not enough memory space, it stores the remaining partitions of the RDD in the filesystem (disk). What I can't seem to understand is the following:
Imagine we have a cluster and we want to persist an RDD. Suppose node A does not have a lot of memory space and that node B does. Let's suppose now that after running the persist command, node A runs out of memory. The question now is:
Does Apache Spark search for more memory space in node B and try to store everything in memory?
Or given that there is not enough space in node A, Spark stores the remaining partitions of the RDD in the disk of node A even if there some memory space available in node B?
Thanks for your answers.
Normally Spark doesn't search for the free space. Data is cached locally on the executor responsible for a particular partition.
The only exception is the case when you use replicated persistence mode - in that case additional copy will be place on another node.
The closest thing I could find is this To cache or not to cache. I had plenty of situations when data was mildly skewed and was getting memory related exceptions/failures when trying to cache/persist into RAM, one way around it was to use StorageLevels like MEMORY_AND_DISK, but obviously it was taking longer to cache and than read those partitions.
Also in Spark UI you can find the information about executors and how much of their memory is used for caching, you can experiment and monitor how it behaves.

Apache Spark running out of memory with smaller amount of partitions

I have an Spark application that keeps running out of memory, the cluster has two nodes with around 30G of RAM, and the input data size is about few hundreds of GBs.
The application is a Spark SQL job, it reads data from HDFS and create a table and cache it, then do some Spark SQL queries and writes the result back to HDFS.
Initially I split the data into 64 partitions and I got OOM, then I was able to fix the memory issue by using 1024 partitions. But why using more partitions helped me solve the OOM issue?
The solution to big data is partition(divide and conquer). Since not all data could be fit into the memory, and it also could not be processed in a single machine.
Each partition could fit into memory and processed(map) in relative short time. After the data is processed for each partition. It need be merged (reduce). This is tradition map reduce
Splitting data to more partitions means that each partition getting smaller.
[Edit]
Spark using revolution concept called Resilient Distributed DataSet(RDD).
There are two types of operations, transformation and acton
Transformations are mapping from one RDD to another. It is lazy evaluated. Those RDD could be treated as intermediate result we don't wanna get.
Actions is used when you really want get the data. Those RDD/data could be treated as what we want it, like take top failing.
Spark will analysed all the operation and create a DAG(Directed Acyclic Graph) before execution.
Spark start compute from source RDD when actions are fired. Then forget it.
(source: cloudera.com)
I made a small screencast for a presentation on Youtube Spark Makes Big Data Sparking.
Spark's operators spill data to disk if it does not fit in memory,
allowing it to run well on any sized data". The issue with large
partitions generating OOM
Partitions determine the degree of parallelism. Apache Spark doc says that, the partitions size should be atleast equal to the number of cores in the cluster.
Less partitions results in
Less concurrency,
Increase memory pressure for transformation which involves shuffle
More susceptible for data skew.
Many partitions might also have negative impact
Too much time spent in scheduling multiple tasks
Storing your data on HDFS, it will be partitioned already in 64 MB or 128 MB blocks as per your HDFS configuration When reading HDFS files with spark, the number of DataFrame partitions df.rdd.getNumPartitions depends on following properties
spark.default.parallelism (Cores available for the application)
spark.sql.files.maxPartitionBytes (default 128MB)
spark.sql.files.openCostInBytes (default 4MB)
Links :
https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/tuning.html
https://databricks.com/session/a-deeper-understanding-of-spark-internals
https://spark.apache.org/faq.html
During Spark Summit Aaron Davidson gave some tips about partitions tuning. He also defined a reasonable number of partitions resumed to below 3 points:
Commonly between 100 and 10000 partitions (note: two below points are more reliable because the "commonly" depends here on the sizes of dataset and the cluster)
lower bound = at least 2*the number of cores in the cluster
upper bound = task must finish within 100 ms
Rockie's answer is right, but he does't get the point of your question.
When you cache an RDD, all of his partitions are persisted (in term of storage level) - respecting spark.memory.fraction and spark.memory.storageFraction properties.
Besides that, in an certain moment Spark can automatically drop's out some partitions of memory (or you can do this manually for entire RDD with RDD.unpersist()), according with documentation.
Thus, as you have more partitions, Spark is storing fewer partitions in LRU so that they are not causing OOM (this may have negative impact too, like the need to re-cache partitions).
Another importante point is that when you write result back to HDFS using X partitions, then you have X tasks for all your data - take all the data size and divide by X, this is the memory for each task, that are executed on each (virtual) core. So, that's not difficult to see that X = 64 lead to OOM, but X = 1024 not.

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