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mcheah authored
In the general case, Spillable's heuristic of checking for memory stress
on every 32nd item after 1000 items are read is good enough. In general,
we do not want to be enacting the spilling checks until later on in the
job; checking for disk-spilling too early can produce unacceptable
performance impact in trivial cases.

However, there are non-trivial cases, particularly if each serialized
object is large, where checking for the necessity to spill too late
would allow the memory to overflow. Consider if every item is 1.5 MB in
size, and the heap size is 1000 MB. Then clearly if we only try to spill
the in-memory contents to disk after 1000 items are read, we would have
already accumulated 1500 MB of RAM and overflowed the heap.

Patch #3656 attempted to circumvent this by checking the need to spill
on every single item read, but that would cause unacceptable performance
in the general case. However, the convoluted cases above should not be
forced to be refactored to shrink the data items. Therefore it makes
sense that the memory spilling thresholds be configurable.

Author: mcheah <mcheah@palantir.com>

Closes #4420 from mingyukim/memory-spill-configurable and squashes the following commits:

6e2509f [mcheah] [SPARK-4808] Removing minimum number of elements read before spill check
3be92cda
History

Apache Spark

Spark is a fast and general cluster computing system for Big Data. It provides high-level APIs in Scala, Java, and Python, and an optimized engine that supports general computation graphs for data analysis. It also supports a rich set of higher-level tools including Spark SQL for SQL and structured data processing, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX for graph processing, and Spark Streaming for stream processing.

http://spark.apache.org/

Online Documentation

You can find the latest Spark documentation, including a programming guide, on the project web page and project wiki. This README file only contains basic setup instructions.

Building Spark

Spark is built using Apache Maven. To build Spark and its example programs, run:

mvn -DskipTests clean package

(You do not need to do this if you downloaded a pre-built package.) More detailed documentation is available from the project site, at "Building Spark".

Interactive Scala Shell

The easiest way to start using Spark is through the Scala shell:

./bin/spark-shell

Try the following command, which should return 1000:

scala> sc.parallelize(1 to 1000).count()

Interactive Python Shell

Alternatively, if you prefer Python, you can use the Python shell:

./bin/pyspark

And run the following command, which should also return 1000:

>>> sc.parallelize(range(1000)).count()

Example Programs

Spark also comes with several sample programs in the examples directory. To run one of them, use ./bin/run-example <class> [params]. For example:

./bin/run-example SparkPi

will run the Pi example locally.

You can set the MASTER environment variable when running examples to submit examples to a cluster. This can be a mesos:// or spark:// URL, "yarn-cluster" or "yarn-client" to run on YARN, and "local" to run locally with one thread, or "local[N]" to run locally with N threads. You can also use an abbreviated class name if the class is in the examples package. For instance:

MASTER=spark://host:7077 ./bin/run-example SparkPi

Many of the example programs print usage help if no params are given.

Running Tests

Testing first requires building Spark. Once Spark is built, tests can be run using:

./dev/run-tests

Please see the guidance on how to run all automated tests.

A Note About Hadoop Versions

Spark uses the Hadoop core library to talk to HDFS and other Hadoop-supported storage systems. Because the protocols have changed in different versions of Hadoop, you must build Spark against the same version that your cluster runs.

Please refer to the build documentation at "Specifying the Hadoop Version" for detailed guidance on building for a particular distribution of Hadoop, including building for particular Hive and Hive Thriftserver distributions. See also "Third Party Hadoop Distributions" for guidance on building a Spark application that works with a particular distribution.

Configuration

Please refer to the Configuration guide in the online documentation for an overview on how to configure Spark.