Does running map task slows down the reduce task? By slowing down I mean do they share a common resource?
Of course they are going to affect the system in one way or another. They are both java processes running on the same machines. However, in system configurations these days, it's not that big of a deal as long as you don't do something stupid with the number of slots.
Each map task or reduce task itself isn't multithreaded or multi-processes, so it'll mostly only use one CPU core. This is why a general rule of thumb is 1 map or reduce slot per core makes a bit of sense. So, if you have 12 cores, you could do something like 8 map slots and 4 reduce slots.
Also, the tasks are going to be sharing the same disk, but this isn't that big of a deal either typically since systems have several disks and disk access comes in bursts.
The best way to figure out the best configuration is just try to try different configurations out. It's not hard to set the number of slots, so just tweak it and then rerun some production-representative jobs.
Note that if you are only running one job at a time, the reducers will not be doing much while the mappers are running. In which case, they won't really affect one another. More realistically, you'll have several jobs running and the map tasks of one job will be running at the same time as the other job's reducers.
Related
Learning Big Data at Uni and I'm kind of confused on the topic of MapReduce. I was wondering how many reducers can run simultaneously. For example lets say if we had 864 reducers, how many could run simultaneously?
All of them can run simultaneously depending upon what is the state(health, i.e. no rouge/bad node) of cluster is, what is the capacity of the cluster is and also how free the cluster is. If there are other MR jobs running on the same cluster then out of your 864 reducers only few will go in running state, and once the capacity is free then another set of reducer will start running.
Also there is one case which happens sometimes is when your reducer/mapper keep on preempting each other and takes up the whole memory. Job fails in majority of this case. To avoid this we generally set less number of reducer.
One line answer is - all of them can run simultaneously; as each of the reducer performs an independent unit of task in map reduce framework.
Now, how many would actually run in parallel, or more precisely when each of them would be scheduled to run depends on many factors including but not limited to resource availability, scheduling mechanism, cluster configuration etc.
I want to run map reduce tasks on a single machine and I want to use all the cores of my machine. Which is the best approach? If I install hadoop in pseudo distributed mode it is possible to use all the cores?
You can make use of the properties mapred.tasktracker.map.tasks.maximum and mapred.tasktracker.reduce.tasks.maximum to increase the number of Mappers/Reducers spawned simultaneously on a TaskTracker as per your hardware specs. By default, it is set to 2, hence a maximum of 2 maps and 2 reduces will run at a given instance. But, one thing to keep in mind is that if your input is very small then framework will decide it's not worth parallelizing the execution. In such a case you need to handle it by tweaking the default split size through mapred.max.split.size.
Having said that, I, based on my personal experience, have noticed that MR jobs are normally I/O(perhaps memory, sometimes) bound. So, CPU does not really become a bottleneck under normal circumstances. As a result you might find it difficult to fully utilize all the cores on one machine at a time for a job.
I would suggest to devise some strategy to decide the proper number of Mappers/Reducers to efficiently carry out the processing to make sure that you are properly utilizing the CPU since Mappers/Reducers take up slots on each node. One approach could be to take the number of cores, multiply it by .75 and then set the number of Mappers and Reducers as per your needs. For example, you have 12 physical cores or 24 virtual cores, then you could have 24*.75 = 18 slots. Now based on your needs you can decide whether to use 9Mappers+9Reducers or 12Mappers+6Reducers or something else.
I'm reposting my answer from this question: Hadoop and map-reduce on multicore machines
For Apache Hadoop 2.7.3, my experience has been that enabling YARN will also enable multi-core support. Here is a simple guide for enabling YARN on a single node:
https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.3/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-common/SingleCluster.html#YARN_on_a_Single_Node
The default configuration seems to work pretty well. If you want to tune your core usage, then perhaps look into setting 'yarn.scheduler.minimum-allocation-vcores' and 'yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-vcores' within yarn-site.xml (https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.1/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-common/yarn-default.xml)
Also, see here for instructions on how to configure a simple Hadoop sandbox with multicore support: https://bitbucket.org/aperezrathke/hadoop-aee
I have an intuition that increasing/decreasing
number of nodes interactively on running job can speed up map-heavy
jobs, but won't help wth reduce heavy jobs, where most of work is done
by reduce.
There's an faq about this but it doesn't really explain very well
http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/faqs/#cluster-18
This question was answered by Christopher Smith, who gave me permission to post here.
As always... "it depends". One thing you can pretty much always count
on: adding nodes later on is not going to help you as much as having
the nodes from the get go.
When you create a Hadoop job, it gets split up in to tasks. These
tasks are effectively "atoms of work". Hadoop lets you tweak the # of
mapper and # of reducer tasks during job creation, but once the job is
created, it is static. Tasks are assigned to "slots". Traditionally,
each node is configured to have a certain number of slots for map
tasks, and a certain number of slots for reduce tasks, but you can
tweak that. Some newer versions of Hadoop don't require you to
designate the slots as being for map or reduce tasks. Anyway, the
JobTracker periodically assigns tasks to slots. Because this is done
dynamically, new nodes coming online can speed up the processing of a
job by providing more slots to execute the tasks.
This sets the stage for understanding the reality of adding new nodes.
There's obviously an Amdahl's law issue where having more slots than
pending tasks accomplishes little (if you have speculative execution
enabled, it does help somewhat, as Hadoop will schedule the same task
to run on many different nodes, so that a slow node's tasks can be
completed by faster nodes if there are spare resources). So, if you
didn't define your job with many map or reduce tasks, adding more
nodes isn't going to help much. Of course, each task imposes some
overhead, so you don't want to go crazy high either. That's why I
suggest a guideline for task size should be "something which takes
~2-5 minutes to execute".
Of course, when you add nodes dynamically, they have one other
disadvantage: they don't have any data local. Obviously, if you are at
the start of a EMR pipeline, none of the nodes have data in them, so
doesn't matter, but if you have an EMR pipeline made of many jobs,
with earlier jobs persisting their results to HDFS, you get a huge
performance boost because the JobTracker will favour shaping and
assigning tasks so nodes have that lovely locality of data (this is a
core trick of the whole MapReduce design to maximize performance). On
the reducer side, data is coming from other map tasks, so dynamically
added nodes are really at no disadvantage as compared to other nodes.
So, in principle, dynamically adding new nodes is actually less likely
to help with IO bound map tasks that are reading from HDFS.
Except...
Hadoop has a variety of cheats under the covers to optimize
performance. Once is that it starts transmitting map output data to
the reducers before the map task completes/the reducer starts. This
obviously is a critical optimization for jobs where the mappers
generate a lot of data. You can tweak when Hadoop starts to kick off
the transfers. Anyway, this means that a newly spun up node might be
at a disadvantage, because the existing nodes might already have such
a huge data advantage. Obviously, the more output that the mappers
have transmitted, the larger the disadvantage.
That's how it all really works. In practice though, a lot of Hadoop
jobs have mappers processing tons of data in a CPU intensive fashion,
but outputting comparatively little data to the reducers (or they
might send a lot of data to the reducers, but the reducers are still
very simple, so not CPU bound at all). Often jobs will have few
(sometimes even 0) reducer tasks, so even extra nodes could help, if
you already have a reduce slot available for every outstanding reduce
task, new nodes can't help. New nodes also disproportionately help out
with CPU bound work, for obvious reasons, so because that tends to
be map tasks more than reduce tasks, that's where people typically see
the win. If your mappers are I/O bound and pulling data from the
network, adding new nodes obviously increases the aggregate bandwidth
of the cluster, so it helps there, but if your map tasks are I/O bound
reading HDFS, the best thing is to have more initial nodes, with data
already spread over HDFS. It's not unusual to see reducers get I/O
bound because of poorly structured jobs, in which case adding more
nodes can help a lot, because it splits up the bandwidth again.
There's a caveat there too of course: with a really small cluster,
reducers get to read a lot of their data from the mappers running on
the local node, and adding more nodes shifts more of the data to being
pulled over the much slower network. You can also have cases where
reducers spend most of their time just multiplexing data processing
from all the mappers sending them data (although that is tunable as
well).
If you are asking questions like this, I'd highly recommend profiling
your job using something like Amazon's offering of KarmaSphere. It
will give you a better picture of where your bottlenecks are and what
are your best strategies for improving performance.
I am looking for a ballpark if any one has experience with this...
Does anyone have benchmarks on the speed of AWS's map reduce?
Lets say I have 100 million records and I am using hadoop streaming (a php script) to map, group, and reduce (with some simple php calculations). The average group will contain 1-6 records.
Also is it better/more cost effective to run a bunch of small instances or larger ones? I realize it is broken up into nodes within an instance but regardless will larger nodes have a higher I/O so that means faster per node per sever (and more cost efficient)?
Also with streaming how is the ratio of mappers vs reducers determined?
I don't know if you can give a meaningful benchmark -- it's kind of like asking how fast a computer program generally runs. It's not possible to say how fast your program will run without knowing anything about the script.
If you mean, how fast are the instances that power an EMR job, they're the same spec as the underlying instances that your specify, from AWS.
If you want a very rough take on the how EMR performs differently: I'd say you will probably run into I/O bottleneck before CPU bottleneck.
In theory this means you should run many small instances and ask for rack diversity, in order to maybe grab more I/O resources from across more machines rather than let them compete. In practice I've found that fewer, higher I/O instances can be more effective. But even this impression doesn't always hold -- really depends on how busy the zone is and where your jobs are scheduled.
In normal java development, if I want to improve the performance of an application my usual procedure would be to run the program with a profiler attached, or alternatively embed within the application a collection of instrumentation marks. In either case, the immediate goal is to identify the hot spot of the application, and subsequently to be able to measure the effect of the changes that I make.
What is the correct analog when the application is a map/reduce job running in a hadoop cluster?
What options are available for collecting performance data when jobs appear to be running more slowly than you would predict from running equivalent logic in your development sandbox?
Map/Reduce Framework
Watch the Job in the Job-Tracker. Here you will see how long the mappers and reducers take. A common example would be if you do too much work in the reducers. In that case you will notice that the mappers finish quite soon while the reducers take forever.
It might also be interesting to see if all your mappers take a similar amount of time. Maybe the job is held up by a few slow tasks? This could indicate a hardware defect in the cluster (in which case speculative execution could be the answer) or the workload is not distributed evenly enough.
The Operating System
Watch the nodes (either with something simple as top or with monitoring such as munin or ganglia) to see if your job is cpu bound or io bound. If for example your reduce phase is io bound you can increase the number of reducers you use.
Something else you might detect here is when your tasks are using to much memory. If the tasktrackers do not have enough RAM increasing the number of tasks per node might actually hurt performance. A monitor system might highlight the resulting swapping.
The Single Tasks
You can run a Mapper/Reducers in isolation for profiling. In this case you can use all the tools you already know.
If you think the performance problem appears only when the job is executed in the cluster you can measure the time of relevant portions of the code with System.nanoTime() and use System.outs to output some rough performance numbers.
Of course there is also the option of adding JVM-Parameters to the child JVMs and connecting a profiler remotely.