Is Apache Zeppelin stable enough to be used in Production - apache-spark

I am using AWS EMR cluster. I have been experimenting with Spark Drivers and Apache Zeppelin Rest APIs to run jobs. I have run several hundred adhoc jobs with Zeppelin and didn't have any concern. With that fact I am considering to use Zeppelin Rest APIs in production. Will be submitting jobs using Rest APIs.
Has anyone experienced stability issues with Zeppelin in Production?

I have a zeppelin running in production in a multiuser environment (+/- 15 users) and it hasn't been very stable. To make it more stable I run zeppelin on its own node, not any longer on the master node.
Anyway, I found the following problems:
In the releases before 0.7.2 Zeppelin created a lot of zombie processes, which causes memory problems after heavy usage.
User libraries can break Zeppelin, this has been the case in the versions prior 0.7.0. E.g. Jackson libraries make Zeppelin unable to communicate with the spark interpreter. In 0.7.0 and up this problem has been mitigated.
There are random freezes when there are a lot of users. The only way to fix this, is a restart of the service. (All versions)
Sometimes when a user starts his interpreter and the local repo is empty, zeppelin doesn't download all the libraries specified in the interpreter config. Then it won't download them again, the only way to mitigate this is to delete the contents of the local repo of the interpreter. (All versions)
Sometimes changes on notebooks don't get saved, which causes users to loose code.
In version 0.6.0 spark interpreters shared a context, which caused users to overwrite each other variables.
Problems are difficult to debug, the logging is not that great yet. Some bugs seem to break the logging and sometimes running an interpreter in debug mode fixes the problem.
So, I wouldn't put it in a production setting yet, where people depend on it. But for testing and data discovery it would be fine. Zeppelin is clearly still in a beta stage.
Also don't run it on the master node, but setup your own instance and let it connect remotely to the cluster. This makes it much more stable. Put it on a beefy node and restart it overnight.
Most of the bugs I encountered are already on the Jira and the developers are working hard to make things better. The stability becomes better and better every release and I see the maintenance load going down every version, so it certainly has potential.

I have used zeppelin now for more than a year. It gets you going quickly when you are just starting but it is not a good candidate for production use cases and especially with more than 10 users and it depends on your cluster resources. These were my concerns overall with Zeppelin.
By default you can't have more than one job running at a time, you
will need to change the configuration to make that happen.
If you are loading additional libraries from s3 or external environments, you can do that only in the beginning or you will have
to restart zeppelin.
spark context is pre-created and there are only few settings you can make changes to.
The editor itself doesn't resize well when your output is large.
I am moving on to jupyter for my use cases which is much strong in my initial assessment.

As of the time of this answer, end of February 2019, my answer would be : NO. Plain and Simple. Zeppelin keeps crashing, hanging and getting unresponsive, notebooks tend to get unloadable due to size errors, very slow execution compared to Jupyter, plus so many limitations regarding third party displaying engines integration (although many effort have been made towards this).
I experienced these issues on a decently sized and capacited cluster, with a single user. I would never, ever, advice it to be a production tool. Not as it is today to the least. Unless you have an admin at hand able to restart the whole thing regularly and track down/fix errors and be in charge of integration.
We moved back to Jupyter, and everything worked smoothly out-of-the box from day one, after struggling to stabilize Zeppelin for weeks.

Related

Do all Apache Cassandra nodes need to use the same Garbage Collector?

I have recently upgraded our Cassandra cluster from 3.11 to 4.0 with the long term goal to also upgrade the Java version. I did not want to do both of these things at once for obvious reasons, however we have been upgraded on C4 for just over two weeks now and I'm looking to upgrade the Java version from jdk8 to jdk11, and also move from CMS Garbage Collector to G1GC.
We wanted to get an idea of what the impact of moving to G1GC would be before going big bang across all nodes.
Is it safe to use a different Garbage collector on different nodes? or should this be something setup in a test environment to monitor?
Thanks in advance.
Yes! That is actually the recommended practice when changing/testing new GC types, assuming that you cannot fully simulate production workloads in a lower environment.
I'd advise making the switch on one or two nodes, and then monitor their performance relative to the CMS nodes.
Logically you can do it since they are different java processes running on different machines. Actual intention behind you doing this activity is to test you must analyze the impact on test environment first and then apply changes on production if you find test results suitable.

Stopping a Running Spark Application (Databricks Interactive Cluster)

I'm using databricks with an interactive cluster. If I review their management user-interface, there is only one "application" listed. And when I try to kill it, I always get this message
HTTP ERROR 405
Problem accessing /app/kill/. Reason:
Method Not Allowed
The end result is that I'm forced to restart the entire cluster. I use their "cluster pool" feature which makes the wait time a bit less. but it still involves waiting for about a minute before I'm able to get back to work.
The reason I need to restart the application is to swap fresh jar's into the spark environment. Otherwise when I repeatedly use addJar(), I run into some annoying jar-hell issues (class not found errors and such).
Why does Databricks only list one application at a time in their "interactive" cluster?
Why doesn't databricks have a way to stop one application and start another in its place (without restarting the whole cluster)?
This affects development productivity when we are forced to sit around waiting an extra minute for no good reason. It is already pretty hard to be productive with spark.

Keep track of all the parameters of spark-submit

I have a team where many member has permission to submit Spark tasks to YARN (the resource management) by command line. It's hard to track who is using how much cores, who is using how much memory...e.g. Now I'm looking for a software, framework or something could help me monitor the parameters that each member used. It will be a bridge between client and YARN. Then I could used it to filter the submit commands.
I did take a look at mlflow and I really like the MLFlow Tracking but it was designed for ML training process. I wonder if there is an alternative for my purpose? Or there is any other solution for the problem.
Thank you!
My recommendation would be to build such a tool yourself as its not too complicated,
have a wrapper script to spark submit which logs the usage in a DB and after the spark job finishes the wrapper will know to release information. could be done really easily.
In addition you can even block new spark submits if your team already asked for too much information.
And as you build it your self its really flexible as you can even create "sub teams" or anything you want.

Jenkins running at very high CPU usage

I recently upgraded from Jenkins 1.6 to 2.5. After I did this, I noticed very high CPU usage, sometimes over 300% (there are only 4 cores, so I don't think it could go over 400%). I'm not sure where to begin debugging this, but here's a thread dump and some screenshots from top/htop
htop
top:
As it turned out, my issue was that several jobs had thousands of old builds. This was fine in Jenkins 1.6 but it's a problem in 2.5 (I guess maybe Jenkins tries to load all the builds into memory when you view the job overview page). To fix it, I just deleted most of the old builds from the problem jobs using this strategy and then reloaded jenkins. Worked like a charm!
I also set the "discard old builds" plugin to keep only the 50 most recent builds, to prevent this from happening again.
Whenever a request comes in, Jenkins will spawn some threads to serve the request. After upgrading Jenkins, it might have invoked at high throttle at that time. Plz check the CPU and memory usage of Jenkins server while the following scenarios :
Jenkins is idle and no other apps are running on the server.
Scheduled a build and no other apps are running on the server.
And compare the behaviors which could help you out to determine whether Jenkins or running jenkins in parallel with other apps are really making trouble.
As #vlp said, try to monitor the jenkins application via JVisualVM with Jstad configuration to hook in. Refer this link to Configure JvisualVM with Jstad.
I have noticed a couple of reasons for abnormal CPU usage with my Jenkins install on Windows 7 Ultimate.
I had recently upgraded from v2.138 to v2.140 plus added a few additional plugins. I started noticing a problem with the Jenkins java executable taking up to 60% of my CPU time every time a job would trigger. None of the jobs were CPU bound, just grabbing data from external servers, so it didn't make any sense. It was fixed with a simple restart of the Jenkins service. I assume the upgrade just didn't finish cleanly.
Java Garbage Collection was throwing errors and hogging the CPU when running with the default memory settings. It was probably overkill, but I went wild and upped the Java Heap Space for Jenkins from the default 256mb to 4gb; which solved this problem for me.See this solution for instructions:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/8122566/4479786
2.5 seems to be a development release, while 1.6 is their Long Term Support version. Thus it seems logical that you should expect some regressions when using the bleeding edge version. The bounty on this question is proof that other users are experiencing this as well. The solution is to report a bug on the Jenkins bug tracker. You can temporarily downgrade to the known good version for now.
Try passwing following argument to jenkins:
-Dhudson.util.AtomicFileWriter.DISABLE_FORCED_FLUSH=true
as mentioned here: https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-52150

Meteor Node Process CPU Usage Nears 100%

I'm having trouble with my Meteor app when it gets to its peak amount of traffic (peak for this is nothing, 1k visits, maybe 2,500 pageviews in a day). CPU usage spikes and never recovers, so I've taken to using Nodetime to monitor usage and I've been reloading the process (forever restart) to get things back to normal.
I'm fairly new to profiling, so finding the underlying cause has me at a loss for where to start. I'm fairly certain it has to do with my app's server code, but the profiling seems to point to the Fibers module as a "hotspot" which I understand aids in making my server code synchronous.
Below is a snippet from the profiling results. I hope someone can guide me in the right direction in troubleshooting this!
While I don't have a specific answer to your question, I have experience dealing with CPU issues for our production meteor app for so I can give you a list of things to investigate.
Upgrade to the latest version of meteor and the appropriate node version (see the changelog). As of this writing that's meteor 0.8.2 and node 0.10.28.
Read this and this article. The latter makes a great point that you really should always try to delay activation of subscriptions until you need them. In particular you may not need to publish anything for users who are not logged in. In my experience, meteor CPU problems have everything to do with subscriptions.
Be careful with observe and observeChanges. These are expensive and are easy to abuse. In particular:
Make sure you are calling stop() on your handles when they are no longer needed (consider using a package like publish-with-relations so this is done for you).
Fetch only the collections and fields that you absolutely need. Observe works by continually diffing objects (requires lots of CPU). The fewer and smaller objects you have, the less there is to compute.
Consider using smart-collections before it is retired. Use oplog tailing - this can make for a night and day difference in performance and CPU usage in your app.
Consider making some things not reactive (also mentioned in the articles above). For us that was a big win. We had one extremely expensive join that was used on two frequently accessed pages on the site. When it got to the point where the CPU was pegged at 100% about every 30 minutes I gave up on reactivity for that element and just did the join on the server and shipped the data to the client via a method call. I also created a server-side expiring cache for these results and stored them by user (special thanks to Matt DeBergalis for this suggestion).
Do a preventative nightly restart. I have a cron job that tells forever to restart our app once a day in the middle of the night. That brings the CPU down from ~10% to 1%. This seems like black magic, but the fact that the CPU usage changes after a reset leads me to believe this is a good idea.
Updated thoughts (1/13/14)
We migrated to oplog tailing as soon as it was available (meteor 0.7) and that made a big difference. Note that in order to get access to the oplog, you'll probably need to either host your own db or run a dedicated instance on the hosting provider of your choice. I'd also recommend adding the facts package to actually tell if its working.
There was a memory leak discovered in publish-with-relations, and as of this writing the atmosphere version (v0.1.5) hasn't been bumped to reflect these changes. If you are using it in production, I strongly recommend checking out the HEAD version and running it locally.
We stopped doing nightly restarts a couple of weeks ago. So far everything has been fine (fingers crossed).
Updated thoughts (7/2/14)
A few months ago we switched over to using an Elastic Deployment on mongohq. It's affordable, the performance has been great, and they even have a blog post which tells you how to enable oplog tailing.
I'd strongly recommend checking out kadira to help diagnose performance issues in your app. Also check out the academy articles which have a number of good tips in them.
I'm also having this problem. Actually there is an issue with 0.6.6.1, I run meteor --release 0.6.6 and the cpu is back to normal now.

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