Let me start out by saying that I'm new to Scala; however, I find the Actor based concurrency model interesting, and I tried to give it a shot for a relatively simple application. The issue that I'm running into is that, although I'm able to get the application to work, the result is far less efficient (in terms of real time, CPU time, and memory usage) than an equivalent Java based solution that uses threads that pull messages off an ArrayBlockingQueue. I'd like to understand why. I suspect that it's likely my lack of Scala knowledge, and that I'm causing all the inefficiency, but after several attempts to rework the application without success, I decided to reach out to the community for help.
My problem is this: I have a gzipped file with many lines in the format of:
SomeID comma_separated_list_of_values
For example:
1234 12,45,82
I'd like to parse each line and get an overall count of the number of occurrences of each value in the comma separated list.
This file may be pretty large (several GB compressed), but the number of unique values per file is pretty small (at most 500). I figured this would be a pretty good opportunity to try to write an Actor-based concurrent Scala application. My solution involves a main driver that creates a pool of parser Actors. The main driver then reads lines from stdin, passes the line off to an Actor that parses the line and keeps a local count of the values. When the main driver has read the last line, it passes a message to each actor indicating that all lines have been read. When the actor receive the 'done' message, they pass their counts to an aggregator that sums the counts from all actors. Once the counts from all parsers have been aggregated, the main driver prints out the statistics.
The problem: The main issue that I'm encountering is the incredible amount of inefficiency of this application. It uses far more CPU and far more memory than an "equivalent" Java application that uses threads and an ArrayBlockingQueue. To put this in perspective, here are some stats that I gathered for a 10 million line test input file:
Scala 1 Actor (parser):
real 9m22.297s
user 235m31.070s
sys 21m51.420s
Java 1 Thread (parser):
real 1m48.275s
user 1m58.630s
sys 0m33.540s
Scala 5 Actors:
real 2m25.267s
user 63m0.730s
sys 3m17.950s
Java 5 Threads:
real 0m24.961s
user 1m52.650s
sys 0m20.920s
In addition, top reports that the Scala application has about 10x the resident memory size. So we're talking about orders of magnitude more CPU and memory here for orders of magnitude worse performance, and I just can't figure out what is causing this. Is it a GC issue, or am I somehow creating far more copies of objects than I realize?
Additional details that may or may not be of importance:
- The scala application is wrapped by a Java class so that I could deliver a self-contained executable JAR file (I don't have the Scala jars on every machine that I might want to run this app).
- The application is being invoked as follows: gunzip -c gzFilename | java -jar StatParser.jar
Here is the code:
Main Driver:
import scala.actors.Actor._
import scala.collection.{ immutable, mutable }
import scala.io.Source
class StatCollector (numParsers : Int ) {
private val parsers = new mutable.ArrayBuffer[StatParser]()
private val aggregator = new StatAggregator()
def generateParsers {
for ( i <- 1 to numParsers ) {
val parser = new StatParser( i, aggregator )
parser.start
parsers += parser
}
}
def readStdin {
var nextParserIdx = 0
var lineNo = 1
for ( line <- Source.stdin.getLines() ) {
parsers( nextParserIdx ) ! line
nextParserIdx += 1
if ( nextParserIdx >= numParsers ) {
nextParserIdx = 0
}
lineNo += 1
}
}
def informParsers {
for ( parser <- parsers ) {
parser ! true
}
}
def printCounts {
val countMap = aggregator.getCounts()
println( "ID,Count" )
/*
for ( key <- countMap.keySet ) {
println( key + "," + countMap.getOrElse( key, 0 ) )
//println( "Campaign '" + key + "': " + countMap.getOrElse( key, 0 ) )
}
*/
countMap.toList.sorted foreach {
case (key, value) =>
println( key + "," + value )
}
}
def processFromStdIn {
aggregator.start
generateParsers
readStdin
process
}
def process {
informParsers
var completedParserCount = aggregator.getNumParsersAggregated
while ( completedParserCount < numParsers ) {
Thread.sleep( 250 )
completedParserCount = aggregator.getNumParsersAggregated
}
printCounts
}
}
The Parser Actor:
import scala.actors.Actor
import collection.mutable.HashMap
import scala.util.matching
class StatParser( val id: Int, val aggregator: StatAggregator ) extends Actor {
private var countMap = new HashMap[String, Int]()
private val sep1 = "\t"
private val sep2 = ","
def getCounts(): HashMap[String, Int] = {
return countMap
}
def act() {
loop {
react {
case line: String =>
{
val idx = line.indexOf( sep1 )
var currentCount = 0
if ( idx > 0 ) {
val tokens = line.substring( idx + 1 ).split( sep2 )
for ( token <- tokens ) {
if ( !token.equals( "" ) ) {
currentCount = countMap.getOrElse( token, 0 )
countMap( token ) = ( 1 + currentCount )
}
}
}
}
case doneProcessing: Boolean =>
{
if ( doneProcessing ) {
// Send my stats to Aggregator
aggregator ! this
}
}
}
}
}
}
The Aggregator Actor:
import scala.actors.Actor
import collection.mutable.HashMap
class StatAggregator extends Actor {
private var countMap = new HashMap[String, Int]()
private var parsersAggregated = 0
def act() {
loop {
react {
case parser: StatParser =>
{
val cm = parser.getCounts()
for ( key <- cm.keySet ) {
val currentCount = countMap.getOrElse( key, 0 )
val incAmt = cm.getOrElse( key, 0 )
countMap( key ) = ( currentCount + incAmt )
}
parsersAggregated += 1
}
}
}
}
def getNumParsersAggregated: Int = {
return parsersAggregated
}
def getCounts(): HashMap[String, Int] = {
return countMap
}
}
Any help that could be offered in understanding what is going on here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
---- Edit ---
Since many people responded and asked for the Java code, here is the simple Java app that I created for comparison purposes. I realize that this is not great Java code, but when I saw the performance of the Scala application, I just whipped up something quick to see how a Java Thread-based implementation would perform as a base-line:
Parsing Thread:
import java.util.Hashtable;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
public class JStatParser extends Thread
{
private ArrayBlockingQueue<String> queue;
private Map<String, Integer> countMap;
private boolean done;
public JStatParser( ArrayBlockingQueue<String> q )
{
super( );
queue = q;
countMap = new Hashtable<String, Integer>( );
done = false;
}
public Map<String, Integer> getCountMap( )
{
return countMap;
}
public void alldone( )
{
done = true;
}
@Override
public void run( )
{
String line = null;
while( !done || queue.size( ) > 0 )
{
try
{
// line = queue.take( );
line = queue.poll( 100, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS );
if( line != null )
{
int idx = line.indexOf( "\t" ) + 1;
for( String token : line.substring( idx ).split( "," ) )
{
if( !token.equals( "" ) )
{
if( countMap.containsKey( token ) )
{
Integer currentCount = countMap.get( token );
currentCount++;
countMap.put( token, currentCount );
}
else
{
countMap.put( token, new Integer( 1 ) );
}
}
}
}
}
catch( InterruptedException e )
{
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
System.err.println( "Failed to get something off the queue: "
+ e.getMessage( ) );
e.printStackTrace( );
}
}
}
}
Driver:
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.Hashtable;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.TreeSet;
import java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue;
public class JPS
{
public static void main( String[] args )
{
if( args.length <= 0 || args.length > 2 || args[0].equals( "-?" ) )
{
System.err.println( "Usage: JPS [filename]" );
System.exit( -1 );
}
int numParsers = Integer.parseInt( args[0] );
ArrayBlockingQueue<String> q = new ArrayBlockingQueue<String>( 1000 );
List<JStatParser> parsers = new ArrayList<JStatParser>( );
BufferedReader reader = null;
try
{
if( args.length == 2 )
{
reader = new BufferedReader( new FileReader( args[1] ) );
}
else
{
reader = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader( System.in ) );
}
for( int i = 0; i < numParsers; i++ )
{
JStatParser parser = new JStatParser( q );
parser.start( );
parsers.add( parser );
}
String line = null;
while( (line = reader.readLine( )) != null )
{
try
{
q.put( line );
}
catch( InterruptedException e )
{
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
System.err.println( "Failed to add line to q: "
+ e.getMessage( ) );
e.printStackTrace( );
}
}
// At this point, we've put everything on the queue, now we just
// need to wait for it to be processed.
while( q.size( ) > 0 )
{
try
{
Thread.sleep( 250 );
}
catch( InterruptedException e )
{
}
}
Map<String,Integer> countMap = new Hashtable<String,Integer>( );
for( JStatParser jsp : parsers )
{
jsp.alldone( );
Map<String,Integer> cm = jsp.getCountMap( );
for( String key : cm.keySet( ) )
{
if( countMap.containsKey( key ))
{
Integer currentCount = countMap.get( key );
currentCount += cm.get( key );
countMap.put( key, currentCount );
}
else
{
countMap.put( key, cm.get( key ) );
}
}
}
System.out.println( "ID,Count" );
for( String key : new TreeSet<String>(countMap.keySet( )) )
{
System.out.println( key + "," + countMap.get( key ) );
}
for( JStatParser parser : parsers )
{
try
{
parser.join( 100 );
}
catch( InterruptedException e )
{
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
System.exit( 0 );
}
catch( IOException e )
{
System.err.println( "Caught exception: " + e.getMessage( ) );
e.printStackTrace( );
}
}
}