Spark Standalone cluster master web UI inaccessible after an application finishes - apache-spark

I have a spark application that finishes without error, but once it's done and saved all of its outputs and the process terminates, the Spark standalone cluster master process becomes a CPU hog, using 16 CPU's full time for hours, and the web UI becomes unresponsive. I have no idea what it could be doing, is there some complicated clean up step?
Some more details:
I've got a Spark standalone cluster (27 workers/nodes) that I've been successfully submitting jobs to for a while. I recently scaled up the size of my applications, the largest now takes 3.5 hours using 100 cores over 27 workers, and each worker has ~dozens of GB of shuffle read/write over the course of the job. Otherwise, the application is no different than the smaller jobs that have run successfully before.

This is a known issue with Spark's standalone cluster, and is caused by the massive event log created by large applications. You can read more at the issue tracking link below.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-12299
At the current time, the best work-around is to disable event logging for large jobs.

Related

How is abnormal Driver termination handled for a Spark App in Yarn cluster mode

We're using AWS EMR for our spark jobs. All our jobs are submitted in yarn cluster mode, so the driver will run in one of the cluster nodes. We use on-demand node for master, and spot-instances for the core nodes. Now, although we almost always choose instances with < 5% interruption rate, sometimes it so happens that a significant fraction of our cluster nodes get terminated prematurely (probably because of higher demands).
So, I was wondering, in the above situation, what happens if a node containing the driver process goes down? Is there any chance of recovery for the spark job in that case? Or is the job gone forever?
The Spark driver is a single point of failure because it holds all cluster state for the running App.
In practice non-ephemeral storage can be used for check-pointing batch Apps after expensive expensive transformations. That said, trying to re-start after such a situation can be done, but when I looked into it, it is quite difficult to say the least. I asked such a question under my name some time ago, you can find it. I am quite technical but felt: gosh what a lot of hard work.
So, the recovery means rolling your own stuff, or accepting a re-run. Since I last evaluated EMR I see that the driver can run on the Master and that can be failed-over, but that is not the same thing as far as I can see, nor what you wish.
EMR has node leveling for CORE nodes in Yarn. Your spark driver/ Application master only gets created in CORE nodes. And HDFS also resides in CORE nodes only.
So to handle your situation in a best way, you may consider to use both CORE and TASK group.
What you can do to tackle this -
MASTER: On-demand
CORE: On-demand. Minimum no of Instances can be 1.
TASK: Spot with autoscaling with minimal EBS volume. Minimum no of Instances can be 0 this case.
This will reduce your cost also ensure that node containing the driver process never goes down.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-master-core-task-nodes.html

Reducing Apache Spark Startup Time

I am running a standalone Spark cluster and submitting my applications (written in SparkR) using spark-submit in client mode. I have a set of applications that I have to run according to the user's input, so I can't keep them running. Each time, to submit an application and start processing data, it takes 15-20 seconds.
Can this time be reduced in any way? I have read about having a webserver on the driver machine, but not sure how that can be done. Also, I am not using any cluster manager (like YARN), just a standalone cluster.
Also, do resources on the client or the cluster such as CPU cores and memory affect this startup time?
Using a Spark job-server to share SparkContexts across applications could help you shave off start-up time. (I am not sure if you need this since your start-up time of ~20s seems quite low.)
The popular Spark job-servers which provide context-sharing are:
Ooyala Spark-Jobserver
Apache Livy
Also, do resources on the client or the cluster such as CPU cores and memory affect this startup time?
Not really. The resources available should only affect the execution times of your application.

Avoid CPU pegging on Spark Standalone

I have a daily pipeline running on Spark Standalone 2.1. Its deployed in and runs on AWS EC2 and uses S3 for its persistence layer. For the most part, the pipeline runs without a hitch, but occasionally the job hangs on a single worker node during a reduceByKey operation. When I work into the worker, I notice that the CPU (as seen via top) is pegged at 100%. My remedy so far is to reboot the worker node so that Spark re-assigns the task and the job proceeds fine from there.
I would like to be able to mitigate this issue. I gather that I can prevent CPU pegging by switching to use YARN as my cluster manager, but I wonder whether I could configure Spark Standalone to prevent CPU pegging by maybe limiting the number of cores that get assigned to the Spark job ? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Spark on Mesos - running multiple Streaming jobs

I have 2 spark streaming jobs that I want to run, as well as keeping some available resources for batch jobs and other operations.
I evaluated Spark Standalone cluster manager, but I realized that I would have to fix the resources for two jobs, which would leave almost no computing power to batch jobs.
I started evaluating Mesos, because it has "fine grained" execution model, where resources are shifted between Spark applications.
1) Does it mean that a single core can be shifted between 2 streaming applications?
2) Although I have spark & cassandra, in order to exploit data locality, do I need to have dedicated core on each of the slave machines to avoid shuffling?
3) Would you recommend running Streaming jobs in "fine grained" or "course grained" mode. I know that logical answer is course grained (in order to minimize the latency of streaming apps) but what when resource in total cluster are limited (cluster of 3 nodes, 4 cores each - there are 2 streaming applications to run and multiple time to time batch jobs)
4) In Mesos, when I run spark streaming job in cluster mode, will it occupy 1 core permanently (like Standalone cluster manager is doing), or will that core execute driver process and sometimes act as executor?
Thank you
Fine grained mode is actually deprecated now. Even with it, each core is allocated to task until completion, but in Spark Streaming, each processing interval is a new job, so tasks only last as long the time it takes to process each interval's data. Hopefully that time is less than the interval time or your processing will back up, eventually running out of memory to store all those RDDs waiting for processing.
Note also that you'll need to have one core dedicated to each stream's Reader. Each will be pinned for the life of the stream! You'll need extra cores in case the stream ingestion needs to be restarted; Spark will try to use a different core. Plus you'll have a core tied up by your driver, if it's also running on the cluster (as opposed to on your laptop or something).
Still, Mesos is a good choice, because it will allocate the tasks to nodes that have capacity to run them. Your cluster sounds pretty small for what you're trying to do, unless the data streams are small themselves.
If you use the Datastax connector for Spark, it will try to keep input partitions local to the Spark tasks. However, I believe that connector assumes it will manage Spark itself, using Standalone mode. So, before you adopt Mesos, check to see if that's really all you need.

Is there a way to understand which executors were used for a job in java/scala code?

I'm having trouble evenly distributing streaming receivers among all executors of a yarn-cluster.
I've got a yarn-cluster with 8 executors, I create 8 streaming custom receivers and spark is supposed to launch these receivers one per executor. However this doesn't happen all the time and sometimes all receivers are launched on the same executor (here's the jira bug: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-10730).
So my idea is to run a dummy job, get the executors that were involved in that job and if I got all the executors, create the streaming receivers.
For doing that anyway I need to understand if there is a way to understand which executors were used for a job in java/scala code.
I believe it is possible to look what executors where doing what jobs by accessing Spark UI and Spark logs. From the official 1.5.0 documentation (here):
Every SparkContext launches a web UI, by default on port 4040, that displays useful information about the application. This includes:
A list of scheduler stages and tasks
A summary of RDD sizes and memory usage
Environmental information.
Information about the running executors
In the following screen you can see what executors are active. In case there are cores/nodes that are not being used, you can detect them by just looking what cores/nodes are actually active and running.
In addition, every executor displays information about the number of tasks that are being running on it.

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