Debugging at full scale can be slow, challenging, and resource intensive. We started off by converting the most resource intensive part of the Hive-based pipeline: stage two. We started with a sample of 50 GB of compressed input, then gradually scaled up to 300 GB, 1 TB, and then 20 TB. At each size increment, we resolved performance and stability issues, but experimenting with 20 TB is where we found our largest opportunity for improvement.
While running on 20 TB of input, we discovered that we were generating too many output files (each sized around 100 MB) due to the large number of tasks. Three out of 10 hours of job runtime were spent moving files from the staging directory to the final directory in HDFS. Initially, we considered two options: Either improve batch renaming in HDFS to support our use case, or configure Spark to generate fewer output files (difficult due to the large number of tasks — 70,000 — in this stage). We stepped back from the problem and considered a third alternative. Since the tmp_table2 table we generate in step two of the pipeline is temporary and used only to store the pipeline’s intermediate output, we were essentially compressing, serializing, and replicating three copies for a single read workload with terabytes of data. Instead, we went a step further: Remove the two temporary tables and combine all three Hive stages into a single Spark job that reads 60 TB of compressed data and performs a 90 TB shuffle and sort.
Maybe it’s just a mindset thing, but the part that impressed me was the number of pull requests for system improvements (and the number which were accepted).
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