Does groupByKey in Spark preserve the original order? - scala

In Spark, the groupByKey function transforms a (K,V) pair RDD into a (K,Iterable<V>) pair RDD.
Yet, is this function stable? i.e is the order in the iterable preserved from the original order?
For example, if I originally read a file of the form:
K1;V11
K2;V21
K1;V12
May my iterable for K1 be like (V12, V11) (thus not preserving the original order) or can it only be (V11, V12) (thus preserving the original order)?

No, the order is not preserved. Example in spark-shell:
scala> sc.parallelize(Seq(0->1, 0->2), 2).groupByKey.collect
res0: Array[(Int, Iterable[Int])] = Array((0,ArrayBuffer(2, 1)))
The order is timing dependent, so it can vary between runs. (I got the opposite order on my next run.)
What is happening here? groupByKey works by repartitioning the RDD with a HashPartitioner, so that all values for a key end in up in the same partition. Then it performs the aggregation locally on each partition.
The repartitioning is also called a "shuffle", because the lines of the RDD are redistributed between nodes. The shuffle files are pulled from the other nodes in parallel. The new partition is built from these pieces in the order that they arrive. The data from the slowest source will be at the end of the new partition, and at the end of the list in groupByKey.
(Data pulled from the worker itself is of course fastest. Since there is no network transfer involved here, this data is pulled synchronously, and thus arrives in order. (It seems to, at least.) So to replicate my experiment you need at least 2 Spark workers.)
Source: http://apache-spark-user-list.1001560.n3.nabble.com/Is-shuffle-quot-stable-quot-td7628.html

Spark (and other map reduce frameworks) sort data by partitioning , and then merging. Since a merge sort is a stable operation I would guess that the result is stable. After looking more into the source I found that if spark.shuffle.spill is true it uses an external sort , merge sort in this case, which is stable. I'm not 100% sure what it does if it's allowed to spill to disk.
From source:
private val externalSorting = SparkEnv.get.conf.getBoolean("spark.shuffle.spill", true)
Partitioning is also a stable operation because it does no reordering

Related

Optimal number of partitions in a grouped PairRDD in Spark

I have two pair RDDs with the structure RDD[String, Int], called rdd1 and rdd2.
Each of these RDDs is groupped by its key, and I want to execute a function over its values (so I will use mapValues method).
Does the method "GroupByKey" creates a new partition for each key or have I to specify this manually using "partitionBy"?
I understand that the partitions of a RDD won't change if I don't perform operations that change the key, so if I perform a mapValues operation on each RDD or if I perform a join operation between the previous two RDDs, the partitions of the resulting RDD won't change. Is it true?
Here we have a code example. Notice that "function" is not defined because it is not important here.
val lvl1rdd=rdd1.groupByKey()
val lvl2rdd=rdd2.groupByKey()
val lvl1_lvl2=lvl1rdd.join(lvl2rdd)
val finalrdd=lvl1_lvl2.mapValues(value => function(value))
If I join the previous RDDs and I execute a function over the values of the resulting RDD (mapValues), all the work is being done in a single worker instead of distributing the different tasks over the different workers nodes of the cluster. I mean, the desired behaviour should be to execute, in parallel, the function passed as a parameter to the mapValues method in so many nodes as the cluster allows us.
1) Avoid groupByKey operations as they act as bottleneck for network I/O and execution performance.
Prefer reduceByKey Operation in this case as the data shuffle is comparatively less than groupByKey and we can witness the difference much better if it is a larger Dataset.
val lvl1rdd = rdd1.reduceByKey(x => function(x))
val lvl1rdd = rdd2.reduceByKey(x => function(x))
//perform the Join Operation on these resultant RDD's
Application of function on RDD's seperately and joining them is far better than joining RDD's and applying a function using groupByKey()
This will also ensure the tasks get distributed among different executors and execute in parallel
Refer this link
2) The underlying partitioning technique is Hash partitioner. If we assume that our data is located in n number of partitions initially then groupByKey Operation will follow Hash mechanism.
partition = key.hashCode() % numPartitions
This will create fixed number of partitions which can be more than intial number when you use the groupByKey Operation.we can also customize the partitions to be made. For example
val result_rdd = rdd1.partitionBy(new HashPartitioner(2))
This will create 2 partitions and in this way we can set the number of partitions.
For deciding the optimal number of partitions refer this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/40866286/7449292

How to `reduce` only within partitions in Spark Streaming, perhaps using combineByKey?

I have data already sorted by key into my Spark Streaming partitions by virtue of Kafka, i.e. keys found on one node are not found on any other nodes.
I would like to use redis and its incrby (increment by) command as a state engine and to reduce the number of requests sent to redis, I would like to partially reduce my data by doing a word count on each worker node by itself. (The key is tag+timestamp to obtain my functionality from word count).
I would like to avoid shuffling and let redis take care of adding data across worker nodes.
Even when I have checked that data is cleanly split among worker nodes, .reduce(_ + _) (Scala syntax) takes a long time (several seconds vs. sub-second for map tasks), as the HashPartitioner seems to shuffle my data to a random node to add it there.
How can I write a simple word count reduce on each partitioner without triggering the shuffling step in Scala with Spark Streaming?
Note DStream objects lack some RDD methods, which are available only through the transform method.
It seems I might be able to use combineByKey. I would like to skip the mergeCombiners() step and instead leave accumulated tuples where they are.
The book "Learning Spark" enigmatically says:
We can disable map-side aggregation in combineByKey() if we know that our data won’t benefit from it. For example, groupByKey() disables map-side aggregation as the aggregation function (appending to a list) does not save any space. If we want to disable map-side combines, we need to specify the partitioner; for now you can just use the partitioner on the source RDD by passing rdd.partitioner.
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/learning-spark/9781449359034/ch04.html
The book then continues to supply no syntax for how to do this, nor have I had any luck with google so far.
What is worse, as far as I know, the partitioner is not set for DStream RDDs in Spark Streaming, so I don't know how to supply a partitioner to combineByKey that doesn't end up shuffling data.
Also, what does "map-side" actually mean and what consequences does mapSideCombine = false have, exactly?
The scala implementation for combineByKey can be found at
https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/rdd/PairRDDFunctions.scala
Look for combineByKeyWithClassTag.
If the solution involves a custom partitioner, please include also a code sample for how to apply that partitioner to the incoming DStream.
This can be done using mapPartitions, which takes a function that maps an iterator of the input RDD on one partition to an iterator over the output RDD.
To implement a word count, I map to _._2 to remove the Kafka key and then perform a fast iterator word count using foldLeft, initializing a mutable.hashMap, which then gets converted to an Iterator to form the output RDD.
val myDstream = messages
.mapPartitions( it =>
it.map(_._2)
.foldLeft(new mutable.HashMap[String, Int])(
(count, key) => count += (key -> (count.getOrElse(key, 0) + 1))
).toIterator
)

Why is HashPartioner needed in the StatefulNetworkWordCount in spark streaming example?

My Question is regarding the StatefulNetworkWordCount example :
https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/examples/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/examples/streaming/StatefulNetworkWordCount.scala
Q1) The stateDstream RDD is maintained by the driver or the worker node or does each worker node has its own local copy of the complete state rdd?
Q2) Why do we need a HashPartitioner in the following line :
val stateDstream = wordDstream.updateStateByKey[Int](newUpdateFunc,
new HashPartitioner (ssc.sparkContext.defaultParallelism), true, initialRDD)
What is happening behind the scenes here ?
To answer both of your questions:
1) The RDD's produced by DStream are distributed across the workers. Similar to non-streaming, this means that records from each RDD produced by the DStream are spread out across the cluster (which is why partitioning matters here).
2) Partitioning is important in this case because it settles how records from every RDD iteration are split up. Especially with a transformation like updateStateByKey(), you tend to see keys of RDD's across various batch intervals stay the same. So it goes without saying here that if our keys from each interval RDD arrayed across the same partitions, this function can work more efficiently and can update state for a key within a partition.
As an example, let us look at the word count program you linked. Let us consider RDD's at two one second intervals (rdd1 at t=1 and rdd2 at t=2). Say rdd1 generated is for the text "hello world" and rdd2 generated also sees the text "hello I'm world". Without partitioning, the records for each RDD can be sent to various partitions on various workers (the "hello" at t=1 and "hello" at t=2 could be sent to separate locations). This implies that an update to the count state would need to reshuffle records on each iteration to obtain the updated count. With a partitioner defined (and remembered as indicated by one of the parameters!), we will see keys "hello" and "world" at the same partition, thereby avoiding a shuffle, and creating a more efficient update.
It is important to also note here that because keys can change, there is a parameter to toggle whether or not to remember the partitioner.

Spark RDD's - how do they work

I have a small Scala program that runs fine on a single-node. However, I am scaling it out so it runs on multiple nodes. This is my first such attempt. I am just trying to understand how the RDDs work in Spark so this question is based around theory and may not be 100% correct.
Let's say I create an RDD:
val rdd = sc.textFile(file)
Now once I've done that, does that mean that the file at file is now partitioned across the nodes (assuming all nodes have access to the file path)?
Secondly, I want to count the number of objects in the RDD (simple enough), however, I need to use that number in a calculation which needs to be applied to objects in the RDD - a pseudocode example:
rdd.map(x => x / rdd.size)
Let's say there are 100 objects in rdd, and say there are 10 nodes, thus a count of 10 objects per node (assuming this is how the RDD concept works), now when I call the method is each node going to perform the calculation with rdd.size as 10 or 100? Because, overall, the RDD is size 100 but locally on each node it is only 10. Am I required to make a broadcast variable prior to doing the calculation? This question is linked to the question below.
Finally, if I make a transformation to the RDD, e.g. rdd.map(_.split("-")), and then I wanted the new size of the RDD, do I need to perform an action on the RDD, such as count(), so all the information is sent back to the driver node?
val rdd = sc.textFile(file)
Does that mean that the file is now partitioned across the nodes?
The file remains wherever it was. The elements of the resulting RDD[String] are the lines of the file. The RDD is partitioned to match the natural partitioning of the underlying file system. The number of partitions does not depend on the number of nodes you have.
It is important to understand that when this line is executed it does not read the file(s). The RDD is a lazy object and will only do something when it must. This is great because it avoids unnecessary memory usage.
For example, if you write val errors = rdd.filter(line => line.startsWith("error")), still nothing happens. If you then write val errorCount = errors.count now your sequence of operations will need to be executed because the result of count is an integer. What each worker core (executor thread) will do in parallel then, is read a file (or piece of file), iterate through its lines, and count the lines starting with "error". Buffering and GC aside, only a single line per core will be in memory at a time. This makes it possible to work with very large data without using a lot of memory.
I want to count the number of objects in the RDD, however, I need to use that number in a calculation which needs to be applied to objects in the RDD - a pseudocode example:
rdd.map(x => x / rdd.size)
There is no rdd.size method. There is rdd.count, which counts the number of elements in the RDD. rdd.map(x => x / rdd.count) will not work. The code will try to send the rdd variable to all workers and will fail with a NotSerializableException. What you can do is:
val count = rdd.count
val normalized = rdd.map(x => x / count)
This works, because count is an Int and can be serialized.
If I make a transformation to the RDD, e.g. rdd.map(_.split("-")), and then I wanted the new size of the RDD, do I need to perform an action on the RDD, such as count(), so all the information is sent back to the driver node?
map does not change the number of elements. I don't know what you mean by "size". But yes, you need to perform an action, such as count to get anything out of the RDD. You see, no work at all is performed until you perform an action. (When you perform count, only the per-partition count will be sent back to the driver, of course, not "all the information".)
Usually, the file (or parts of the file, if it's too big) is replicated to N nodes in the cluster (by default N=3 on HDFS). It's not an intention to split every file between all available nodes.
However, for you (i.e. the client) working with file using Spark should be transparent - you should not see any difference in rdd.size, no matter on how many nodes it's split and/or replicated. There are methods (at least, in Hadoop) to find out on which nodes (parts of the) file can be located at the moment. However, in simple cases you most probably won't need to use this functionality.
UPDATE: an article describing RDD internals: https://cs.stanford.edu/~matei/papers/2012/nsdi_spark.pdf

Spark: increase number of partitions without causing a shuffle?

When decreasing the number of partitions one can use coalesce, which is great because it doesn't cause a shuffle and seems to work instantly (doesn't require an additional job stage).
I would like to do the opposite sometimes, but repartition induces a shuffle. I think a few months ago I actually got this working by using CoalescedRDD with balanceSlack = 1.0 - so what would happen is it would split a partition so that the resulting partitions location where all on the same node (so small net IO).
This kind of functionality is automatic in Hadoop, one just tweaks the split size. It doesn't seem to work this way in Spark unless one is decreasing the number of partitions. I think the solution might be to write a custom partitioner along with a custom RDD where we define getPreferredLocations ... but I thought that is such a simple and common thing to do surely there must be a straight forward way of doing it?
Things tried:
.set("spark.default.parallelism", partitions) on my SparkConf, and when in the context of reading parquet I've tried sqlContext.sql("set spark.sql.shuffle.partitions= ..., which on 1.0.0 causes an error AND not really want I want, I want partition number to change across all types of job, not just shuffles.
Watch this space
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-5997
This kind of really simple obvious feature will eventually be implemented - I guess just after they finish all the unnecessary features in Datasets.
I do not exactly understand what your point is. Do you mean you have now 5 partitions, but after next operation you want data distributed to 10? Because having 10, but still using 5 does not make much sense… The process of sending data to new partitions has to happen sometime.
When doing coalesce, you can get rid of unsued partitions, for example: if you had initially 100, but then after reduceByKey you got 10 (as there where only 10 keys), you can set coalesce.
If you want the process to go the other way, you could just force some kind of partitioning:
[RDD].partitionBy(new HashPartitioner(100))
I'm not sure that's what you're looking for, but hope so.
As you know pyspark use some kind of "lazy" way of running. It will only do the computation when there is some action to do (for exemple a "df.count()" or a "df.show()". So what you can do is define the a shuffle partition between those actions.
You can write :
sparkSession.sqlContext().sql("set spark.sql.shuffle.partitions=100")
# you spark code here with some transformation and at least one action
df = df.withColumn("sum", sum(df.A).over(your_window_function))
df.count() # your action
df = df.filter(df.B <10)
df = df.count()
sparkSession.sqlContext().sql("set spark.sql.shuffle.partitions=10")
# you reduce the number of partition because you know you will have a lot
# less data
df = df.withColumn("max", max(df.A).over(your_other_window_function))
df.count() # your action