Can sparkSQL dataframe exceed the memory? - apache-spark

I`m using SparkSQL doing some calculation. Every 5 minutes there will be a new data frame comes in. I need to run calculation on the recent one week dataframe.
Which means I need to merge 12*24*7 = 2016 dataframes to a big one and run calculation.
The size is going to beyond my RAM size. All the nodes within my spark cluster have totally 128G memory which is not enough.
So I want to know what will happen if the dataframe too big to fit in memory? Will spark swap it out to disk temporarily? Do I need to explicitly ask spark to swap or it will done automatically?

Do you have 2016 input files that you need to read in? If so, spark's read functions accept wildcards, so you can read them all at once as opposed to setting up some loop/read/merge functionality. And depending on your input files, the size of data frame in memory could be much smaller than the size of your saved files. So, it's possible your data frame will fit into memory.
To answer your question, Spark will automatically spill to disk as needed if it runs out of memory.

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.

Memory Management Pyspark

1.) I understand that "Spark's operators spills data to disk if it does not fit memory allowing it to run well on any sized data".
If this is true, why do we ever get OOM (Out of Memory) errors?
2.) Increasing the no. of executor cores increases parallelism. Would that also increase the chances of OOM, because the same memory is now divided into smaller parts for each core?
3.) Spark is much more susceptible to OOM because it performs operations in memory as compared to Hive, which repeatedly reads, writes into disk. Is that correct?
There is one angle that you need to consider there. You may get memory leaks if the data is not properly distributed. That means that you need to distribute your data evenly (if possible) on the Tasks so that you reduce shuffling as much as possible and make those Tasks to manage their own data. So if you need to perform a join, if data is distributed randomly, every Task (and therefore executor) will have to:
See what data they have
Send data to other executors (and tasks) to provide the same keys they need
Request the data that is needed by that task to the others
All that data exchange may cause network bottlenecks if you have a large dataset and also will make every Task to hold their data in memory plus whatever has been sent and temporary objects. All of those will blow up memory.
So to prevent that situation you can:
Load the data already repartitioned. By that I mean, if you are loading from a DB, try Spark stride as defined here. Please refer to the partitionColumn, lowerBound, upperBound attributes. That way you will create a number of partitions on the dataframe that will set the data on different tasks based on the criteria you need. If you are going to use a join of two dataframes, try similar approach on them so that partitions are similar (for not to say same) and that will prevent shuffling over network.
When you define partitions, try to make those values as evenly distributed among tasks as possible
The size of each partition should fit on memory. Although there could be spill to disk, that would slow down performance
If you don't have a column that make the data evenly distributed, try to create one that would have n number of different values, depending on the n number of tasks that you have
If you are reading from a csv, that would make it harder to create partitions, but still it's possible. You can either split the data (csv) on multiple files and create multiple dataframes (performing a union after they are loaded) or you can read that big csv and apply a repartition on the column you need. That will create shuffling as well, but it will be done once if you cache the dataframe already repartitioned
Reading from parquet it's possible that you may have multiple files but if they are not evenly distributed (because the previous process that generated didn't do it well) you may end up on OOM errors. To prevent that situation, you can load and apply repartition on the dataframe too
Or another trick valid for csv, parquet files, orc, etc. is to create a Hive table on top of that and run a query from Spark running a distribute by clause on the data, so that you can make Hive to redistribute, instead of Spark
To your question about Hive and Spark, I think you are right up to some point. Depending on the execute engine that Hive uses in your case (map/reduce, Tez, Hive on Spark, LLAP) you can have different behaviours. With map/reduce, as they are mostly disk operations, the chance to have a OOM is much lower than on Spark. Actually from Memory point of view, map/reduce is not that affected because of a skewed data distribution. But (IMHO) your goal should be to find always the best data distribution for the Spark job you are running and that will prevent that problem
Another consideration is if you are testing in a dev environment that doesn't have same data as in a prod environment. I suppose the data distribution should be similar although volumes may differ a lot (I am talking from experience ;)). In that case, when you assign Spark tuning parameters on the spark-submit command, they may be different in prod. So you need to invest some time on finding the best approach on dev and fine tune in prod
Huge majority of OOM in Spark are on the driver, not executors. This is usually a result of running .collect or similar actions on a dataset that won't fit in the driver memory.
Spark does a lot of work under the hood to parallelize the work, when using structured APIs (in contrast to RDDs) the chances of causing OOM on executor are really slim. Some combinations of cluster configuration and jobs can cause memory pressure that will impact performance and cause lots of garbage collection to happen so you need to address it, however spark should be able to handle low memory without explicit exception.
Not really - as above, Spark should be able to recover from memory issues when using structured APIs, however it may need intervention if you see garbage collection and performance impact.

How to tell if spark session will be able to hold data size in dataframe?

Intend to read data from an Oracle DB with pyspark (running in local mode) and store locally as parquet. Is there a way to tell whether a spark session dataframe will be able to hold the amount of data from the query (which will be the whole table, ie. select * from mytable)? Are there common solutions for if the data would not be able to fit in a dataframe?
* Saw a similar question here, but was a little confused by the discussion in the comments
As you are running on local, So I assume it is not on a cluster. You can not say exactly how much memory would require? However, you can go close to it. You check your respective table size that how much disk space it's using. Suppose you mytable has occupied 1GB of Hard disk then spark would be required RAM more than that, because Spark's engine required some memory for its own processing. Try to have 2GB extra, for safer side than actual table size.
To check you table size in Oracle, You can use below query:
select segment_name,segment_type,bytes/1024/1024 MB
from dba_segments
where segment_type='TABLE' and segment_name='<yourtablename>';
It will give you a result in MB.
To configure JVM related parameter in Apache-Spark you can check this.
It doesn't matter how big the table is if you are running spark in a distributed manner. You would need to worry about the memory if:-
You are reading the data in the driver and then doing a broadcast.
Caching the dataframe for some computation.
Usually for your spark application a DAG gets generated and if you are using JDBC source then the workers will read the data directly and use the shuffle space and off-heap to disk for memory intensive computation.

Spark dataset exceeds total ram size

I am recently working in spark and came across few queries which I still couldn't resolve.
Let's say i have a dataset of 100GB and my ram size of the cluster is
16 GB.
Now, I know in case of simply reading the file and saving it in the HDFS will work as Spark will do it for each partition. What will happen when I perform sorting or aggregation transformation on 100GB data? How will it process 100GB in memory since we need entire data in case of sorting?
I have gone through below link but this only tells us what spark do in case of persisting, what I am looking is Spark aggregations or sorting on dataset greater than ram size.
Spark RDD - is partition(s) always in RAM?
Any help is appreciated.
There are 2 things you might want to know.
Once Spark reaches the memory limit, it will start spilling data to
disk. Please check this Spark faq and also there are severals
question from SO talking about the same, for example, this one.
There is an algorihtm called external sort that allows you to sort datasets which do not fit in memory. Essentially, you divide the large dataset by chunks which actually fit in memory, sort each chunk and write each chunk to disk. Finally, merge every sorted chunk in order to get the whole dataset sorted. Spark supports external sorting as you can see here and here is the implementation.
Answering your question, you do not really need that your data fit in memory in order to sort it, as I explained to you before. Now, I would encourage you to think about an algorithm for data aggregation dividing the data by chunks, just like external sort does.
There are multiple things you need to consider. Because you have 16RAM and 100GB data set, it will be good idea to keep persistence in DISK. It maybe difficult as when aggregating if data set has high cardinality. If the cardinality is low you will be better of to do aggregate at each RDD before merging into whole dataset. Also remember to make sure that each partition in RDD is less than memory (default value 0.4*container_size)

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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