Spark UI Executor

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In Spark UI, there are 18 executors are added and 6 executors are removed. When I checked the executor tabs, I've seen many dead and excluded executors. Currently, dynamic allocation is used in EMR.

I've looked up some postings about dead executors but these mostly related with job failure. For my case, it seems that the job itself is not failed but can see dead and excluded executors.

What are these "dead" and "excluded" executors? How does it affect the performance of current spark cluster configuration? (If it affects performance) then what would be good way to improve the performance?

1 Answers

With dynamic alocation enabled spark is trying to adjust number of executors to number of tasks in active stages. Lets take a look at this example:

  1. Job started, first stage is read from huge source which is taking some time. Lets say that this source is partitioned and Spark generated 100 task to get the data. If your executor has 5 cores, Spark is going to spawn 20 executors to ensure the best parallelism (20 executors x 5 cores = 100 tasks in parallel)

  2. Lets say that on next step you are doing repartitioning or sor merge join, with shuffle partitions set to 200 spark is going to generated 200 tasks. He is smart enough to figure out that he has currently only 100 cores avilable so if new resources are avilable he will try to spawn another 20 executors (40 executors x 5 cores = 200 tasks in parallel)

  3. Now the join is done, in next stage you have only 50 partitions, to calculate this in parallel you dont need 40 executors, 10 is ok (10 executors x 5 cores = 50 tasks in paralell). Right now if process is taking enough of time Spark can free some resources and you are going to see deleted executors.

  4. Now we have next stage which involves repartitioning. Number of partitions equals to 200. Withs 10 executors you can process in paralell only 50 partitions. Spark will try to get new executors...

You can read this blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/best-practices-for-successfully-managing-memory-for-apache-spark-applications-on-amazon-emr/

The problem with the spark.dynamicAllocation.enabled property is that it requires you to set subproperties. Some example subproperties are spark.dynamicAllocation.initialExecutors, minExecutors, and maxExecutors. Subproperties are required for most cases to use the right number of executors in a cluster for an application, especially when you need multiple applications to run simultaneously. Setting subproperties requires a lot of trial and error to get the numbers right. If they’re not right, the capacity might be reserved but never actually used. This leads to wastage of resources or memory errors for other applications.

Here you will find some hints, from my experience it is worth to set maxExecutors if you are going to run few jobs in parallel in the same cluster as most of the time it is not worth to starve other jobs just to get 100% efficiency from one job

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