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Commit 0eb4a7fb authored by Andrew Or's avatar Andrew Or
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[SPARK-4480] Avoid many small spills in external data structures

**Summary.** Currently, we may spill many small files in `ExternalAppendOnlyMap` and `ExternalSorter`. The underlying root cause of this is summarized in [SPARK-4452](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-4452). This PR does not address this root cause, but simply provides the guarantee that we never spill the in-memory data structure if its size is less than a configurable threshold of 5MB. This config is not documented because we don't want users to set it themselves, and it is not hard-coded because we need to change it in tests.

**Symptom.** Each spill is orders of magnitude smaller than 1MB, and there are many spills. In environments where the ulimit is set, this frequently causes "too many open file" exceptions observed in [SPARK-3633](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-3633).
```
14/11/13 19:20:43 INFO collection.ExternalSorter: Thread 60 spilling in-memory batch of 4792 B to disk (292769 spills so far)
14/11/13 19:20:43 INFO collection.ExternalSorter: Thread 60 spilling in-memory batch of 4760 B to disk (292770 spills so far)
14/11/13 19:20:43 INFO collection.ExternalSorter: Thread 60 spilling in-memory batch of 4520 B to disk (292771 spills so far)
14/11/13 19:20:43 INFO collection.ExternalSorter: Thread 60 spilling in-memory batch of 4560 B to disk (292772 spills so far)
14/11/13 19:20:43 INFO collection.ExternalSorter: Thread 60 spilling in-memory batch of 4792 B to disk (292773 spills so far)
14/11/13 19:20:43 INFO collection.ExternalSorter: Thread 60 spilling in-memory batch of 4784 B to disk (292774 spills so far)
```

**Reproduction.** I ran the following on a small 4-node cluster with 512MB executors. Note that the back-to-back shuffle here is necessary for reasons described in [SPARK-4522](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-4452). The second shuffle is a `reduceByKey` because it performs a map-side combine.
```
sc.parallelize(1 to 100000000, 100)
  .map { i => (i, i) }
  .groupByKey()
  .reduceByKey(_ ++ _)
  .count()
```
Before the change, I notice that each thread may spill up to 1000 times, and the size of each spill is on the order of 10KB. After the change, each thread spills only up to 20 times in the worst case, and the size of each spill is on the order of 1MB.

Author: Andrew Or <andrew@databricks.com>

Closes #3353 from andrewor14/avoid-small-spills and squashes the following commits:

49f380f [Andrew Or] Merge branch 'master' of https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/spark into avoid-small-spills
27d6966 [Andrew Or] Merge branch 'master' of github.com:apache/spark into avoid-small-spills
f4736e3 [Andrew Or] Fix tests
a919776 [Andrew Or] Avoid many small spills
parent 73fedf5a
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