The YARN Fair Scheduler

Justin Kestelyn discusses the Fair Scheduler in YARN:

Assume that we have a YARN cluster with total resources <memory: 800GB, vcores 200> with two queues: root.busy (weight=1.0) and root.sometimes_busy (weight 3.0).  There are generally four scenarios of interest:

 

• Scenario A: The busy queue is full with applications, and sometimes_busy queue has a handful of running applications (say 10%, i.e. <memory: 80GB, vcores: 20>). Soon, a large number of applications are added to the sometimes_busy queue in a relatively short time window. All the new applications in sometimes_busy will be pending, and will become active as containers finish up in thebusy queue. If the tasks in the busy queue are fairly short-lived, then the applications in thesometimes_busy queue will not wait long to get containers assigned. However, if the tasks in the busyqueue take a long time to finish, the new applications in the sometimes_busy queue will stay pending for a long time. In either case, as the applications in the sometimes_busy queue become active, many of the running applications in the busy queue will take much longer to finish.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive into YARN, this is a good series to start with.