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Commit 652b781a authored by Andrew Ash's avatar Andrew Ash Committed by Patrick Wendell
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SPARK-3526 Add section about data locality to the tuning guide

cc kayousterhout

I have a few outstanding questions from compiling this documentation:
- What's the difference between NO_PREF and ANY?  I understand the implications of the ordering but don't know what an example of each would be
- Why is NO_PREF ahead of RACK_LOCAL?  I would think it'd be better to schedule rack-local tasks ahead of no preference if you could only do one or the other.  Is the idea to wait longer and hope for the rack-local tasks to turn into node-local or better?
- Will there be a datacenter-local locality level in the future?  Apache Cassandra for example has this level

Author: Andrew Ash <andrew@andrewash.com>

Closes #2519 from ash211/SPARK-3526 and squashes the following commits:

44cff28 [Andrew Ash] Link to spark.locality parameters rather than copying the list
6d5d966 [Andrew Ash] Stay focused on Spark, no astronaut architecture mumbo-jumbo
20e0e31 [Andrew Ash] SPARK-3526 Add section about data locality to the tuning guide
parent 36bdb5b7
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......@@ -233,6 +233,39 @@ Spark prints the serialized size of each task on the master, so you can look at
decide whether your tasks are too large; in general tasks larger than about 20 KB are probably
worth optimizing.
## Data Locality
Data locality can have a major impact on the performance of Spark jobs. If data and the code that
operates on it are together than computation tends to be fast. But if code and data are separated,
one must move to the other. Typically it is faster to ship serialized code from place to place than
a chunk of data because code size is much smaller than data. Spark builds its scheduling around
this general principle of data locality.
Data locality is how close data is to the code processing it. There are several levels of
locality based on the data's current location. In order from closest to farthest:
- `PROCESS_LOCAL` data is in the same JVM as the running code. This is the best locality
possible
- `NODE_LOCAL` data is on the same node. Examples might be in HDFS on the same node, or in
another executor on the same node. This is a little slower than `PROCESS_LOCAL` because the data
has to travel between processes
- `NO_PREF` data is accessed equally quickly from anywhere and has no locality preference
- `RACK_LOCAL` data is on the same rack of servers. Data is on a different server on the same rack
so needs to be sent over the network, typically through a single switch
- `ANY` data is elsewhere on the network and not in the same rack
Spark prefers to schedule all tasks at the best locality level, but this is not always possible. In
situations where there is no unprocessed data on any idle executor, Spark switches to lower locality
levels. There are two options: a) wait until a busy CPU frees up to start a task on data on the same
server, or b) immediately start a new task in a farther away place that requires moving data there.
What Spark typically does is wait a bit in the hopes that a busy CPU frees up. Once that timeout
expires, it starts moving the data from far away to the free CPU. The wait timeout for fallback
between each level can be configured individually or all together in one parameter; see the
`spark.locality` parameters on the [configuration page](configuration.html#scheduling) for details.
You should increase these settings if your tasks are long and see poor locality, but the default
usually works well.
# Summary
This has been a short guide to point out the main concerns you should know about when tuning a
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