I have a dataset in a csv file that occupies two blocks in HDFS and replicated on two nodes, A and B. Each node has a copy of the dataset.
When Spark starts processing the data, I have seen two ways how Spark loads the dataset as input. It either loads the entire dataset into memory on one node and perform most of the tasks on it or loads the dataset into two nodes and spill the tasks on both nodes (based on what I observed on the history server). For both cases, there is sufficient capacity to keep the whole datasets in memory.
I repeated the same experiment multiple times and Spark seemed to alternate between these two ways. Supposedly Spark inherits the input split location as in a MapReduce job. From my understanding, MapReduce should be able to take advantage of two nodes. I don't understand why Spark or MapReduce will alternate between the two cases.
When only one node is used for processing, the performance is worse.
When your loading the data in Spark you can specify the minimum number of splits and this will force Spark to load the data on multiple machines (with the textFile api you would add minPartitions=2 to your call.
Related
We are having multiple joins involving a large table (about 500gb in size). The output of the joins is stored into multiple small files each of size 800kb-1.5mb. Because of this the job is split into multiple tasks and taking a long time to complete.
We have tried using spark tuning configurations like using broadcast join, changing partition size, changing max records per file etc., But there is no performance improvement with this methods and the issue is also not fixed. Using coalesce makes the job struck at that stage and there is no progress.
Please view this link for Spark UI metrics screenshot, https://i.stack.imgur.com/FfyYy.png
The spark UI confirms your report of too many small files. You will get a file for every spark partition, and you have 33,479 in your final stage where you're writing the output. 33k partitions was probably the right number of partitions for your join but not the right number for your write.
You need to add another stage in your job that comes after your join. That 2nd needs to reduce the number of spark partitions to a reasonable number (that outputs 32MB - ~128MB files)
Something like a coalesce, or repartition. Maybe even a sort :(
You want to target ~350 partitions.
This diagram shows what you want to do manually or automatically (with spark on Databricks)
If you're using Databricks then it's easy as with Delta Lake you can turn on Auto Optimize
I want to create a small dataframe with just 10 rows. And I want to force this dataframe to be distributed to two worker nodes. My cluster has only two worker nodes. How do I do that?
Currently, whenever I create such a small dataframe, it gets persisted in only one worker node.
I know, Spark is build for Big Data and this question does not make much sense. However, conceptually, I just wanted to know if at all it is feasible or possible to enforce the Spark dataframe to be split across all the worker nodes (given a very small dataframe with 10-50 rows only).
Or, it is completely impossible and we have to rely upon the Spark master for this dataframe distribution?
I'm trying to understand spark shuffle process deeply. When i start reading i came across the following point.
Spark writes the Map task(ShuffleMapTask) output directly to disk on completion.
I would like to understand the following w.r.t to Hadoop MapReduce.
If both Map-Reduce and Spark writes the data to the local disk then how spark shuffle process is different from Hadoop MapReduce?
Since data is represented as RDD's in Spark why don't these outputs remain in the node executors memory?
How is the output of the Map tasks from Hadoop MapReduce and Spark different?
If there are lot of small intermediate files as output how spark handles the network and I/O bottleneck?
First of all Spark doesn't work in a strict map-reduce manner and map output is not written to disk unless it is necessary. To disk are written shuffle files.
It doesn't mean that data after the shuffle is not kept in memory. Shuffle files in Spark are written mostly to avoid re-computation in case of multiple downstream actions. Why to write to a file system at all? There at least two interleaved reasons:
memory is a valuable resource and in-memory caching in Spark is ephemeral. Old data can be evicted from cache when needed.
shuffle is an expensive process we want to avoid if not necessary. It makes more sense to store shuffle data in a manner which makes it persistent during a lifetime of a given context.
Shuffle itself, apart from the ongoing low level optimization efforts and implementation details, isn't different at all. It is based on the same basic approach with all its limitations.
How tasks are different form Hadoo maps? As nicely illustrated by Justin Pihony multiple transformations which doesn't require shuffles are squashed together in a single tasks. Since these operate on standard Scala Iterators operations on individual elements can be piped.
Regarding network and I/O bottlenecks there is no silver bullet here. While Spark can reduce amount of data which is written to disk or shuffled by combining transformations, caching in memory and providing transformation aware worker preferences, it is a subject to the same limitations like any other distributed framework.
If both Map-Reduce and Spark writes the data to the local disk then how spark shuffle process is different from Hadoop MapReduce?
When you execute a Spark application, the very first thing is starting the SparkContext first that becomes the home of multiple interconnected services with DAGScheduler, TaskScheduler and SchedulerBackend being among the most important ones.
DAGScheduler is the main orchestrator and is responsible for transforming a RDD lineage graph (i.e. a directed acyclic graph of RDDs) into stages. While doing it, DAGScheduler traverses the parent dependencies of the final RDD and creates a ResultStage with parent ShuffleMapStages.
A ResultStage is (mostly) the last stage with ShuffleMapStages being its parents. I said mostly because I think I may have seen that you can "schedule" a ShuffleMapStage.
This is the very early and first optimization Spark applies to your Spark jobs (that together create a Spark application) - execution pipelining where multiple transformations are wired together to create a single stage (because their inter-dependencies are narrow). That's what makes Spark faster than Hadoop MapReduce since two or more transformations can get executed one by one with no data shuffling possibly all in memory.
A single stage is as wide until it hits ShuffleDependency (aka wide dependency).
There are RDD transformations that will cause shuffling (due to creating a ShuffleDependency). That's the moment where Spark is very much like Hadoop's MapReduce since it will save partial shuffle outputs to...local disks on executors.
When a Spark application starts it requests executors from a cluster manager (there are three supported: Spark Standalone, Apache Mesos and Hadoop YARN). This is what SchedulerBackend is for -- to manage communication between your Spark application and cluster resources.
(Let's assume you are not using External Shuffle Manager)
Executors host their own local BlockManagers that are responsible for managing RDD blocks that are kept on local hard drive (possibly in memory and replicated too). You can control RDD block persistence using cache and persist operators and StorageLevels. You can use Storage and Executors tabs in web UI to track blocks with their location and size.
The difference between Spark storing data locally (on executors) and Hadoop MapReduce is that:
The partial results (after computing ShuffleMapStages) are saved on local hard drives not HDFS which is a distributed file system with a very expensive saves.
Only some files are saved to local hard drive (after operations being pipelined) which does not happen in Hadoop MapReduce that saves all maps to HDFS.
Let me answer the following item:
If there are lot of small intermediate files as output how spark handles the network and I/O bottleneck?
That's the trickest part in the Spark execution plan and heavily depends on how wide the shuffling is. If you work only with local data (multiple executors on a single machine) you will see no data traffic since the data is in place already.
If the data shuffle is required, executors will send data between each other and that will increase the traffic.
Data Exchange Between Nodes in Spark Application
Just to elaborate on the traffic between nodes in a Spark application.
Broadcast variables are the means of sending data from the driver to executors.
Accumulators are the means of sending data from executors to the driver.
Operators like collect will pull all the remote blocks from executors to the driver.
I'm trying to benchmark a few approaches to putting an image processing algorithm into apache spark. For one step in this algorithm, a computation on a pixel in the image will depend on an unknown amount of surrounding data, so we can't partition the image with guaranteed sufficient overlap a priori.
One solution to that problem I need to benchmark is for a worker node to ask the master node for more data when it encounters a pixel with insufficient surrounding data. I'm not convinced this is the way to do things, but I need to benchmark it anyway because of reasons.
Unfortunately, after a bunch of googling and reading docs I can't find any way for a processingFunc called as part of sc.parallelize(partitions).map(processingFunc) to query the master node for more data from a different partition mid-computation.
Does a way for a worker node to ask the master for more data exist in spark, or will I need to hack something together that kind of goes around spark?
Master Node in Spark is for allocating the resources to a particular job and once the resources are allocated, the Driver ships the complete code with all its dependencies to the various executors.
The first step in every code is to load the data to the Spark cluster. You can read the data from any underlying data repository like Database, filesystem, webservices etc.
Once data is loaded it is wrapped into an RDD which is partitioned across the nodes in the cluster and further stored in the workers/ Executors Memory. Though you can control the number of partitions by leveraging various RDD API's but you should do it only when you have valid reasons to do so.
Now all operations are performed over RDD's using its various methods/ Operations exposed by RDD API. RDD keep tracks of partitions and partitioned data and depending upon the need or request it automatically query the appropriate partition.
In nutshell, you do not have to worry about the way data is partitioned by RDD or which partition stores which data and how they communicate with each other but if you do care, then you can write your own custom partitioner, instructing Spark of how to partition your data.
Secondly if your data cannot be partitioned then I do not think Spark would be an ideal choice because that will result in processing of everything in 1 single machine which itself is contrary to the idea of distributed computing.
Not sure what is exactly your use case but there are people who have been leveraging Spark for Image processing. see here for the comments from Databricks
I am writing Spark application (Single client) and dealing with lots of small files upon whom I want to run an algorithm. The same algorithm for each one of them. But the files cannot be loaded into the same RDD for the algorithm to work, Because it should sort data within one file boundary.
Today I work on a file at a time, As a result I have poor resource utilization (Small amount of data each action, lots of overhead)
Is there any way to perform the same action/transformation on multiple RDD's simultaneously (And only using one driver program)? Or should I look for another platform? Because such mode of operation isn't classic for Spark.
If you use SparkContext.wholeTextFiles, then you could read the files into one RDD and each partition of the RDD would have the content of a single file. Then, you could work on each partition separately using SparkContext.mapPartitions(sort_file), where sort_file is the sorting function that you want to apply on each file. This would use concurrency better than your current solution, as long as your files are small enough that they can be processed in a single partition.