scala - Spark runs out of memory when grouping by key

Question

I am attempting to perform a simple transformation of common crawl data using Spark host on an EC2 using this guide, my code looks like this:

package ccminer

import org.apache.spark.SparkContext
import org.apache.spark.SparkContext._

object ccminer {
  val english = "english|en|eng"
  val spanish = "es|esp|spa|spanish|espanol"
  val turkish = "turkish|tr|tur|turc"
  val greek = "greek|el|ell"
  val italian = "italian|it|ita|italien"
  val all = (english :: spanish :: turkish :: greek :: italian :: Nil).mkString("|")

  def langIndep(s: String) = s.toLowerCase().replaceAll(all, "*")

  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    if (args.length != 3) {
      System.err.println("Bad command line")
      System.exit(-1)
    }

    val cluster = "spark://???"
    val sc = new SparkContext(cluster, "Common Crawl Miner",
      System.getenv("SPARK_HOME"), Seq("/root/spark/ccminer/target/scala-2.10/cc-miner_2.10-1.0.jar"))

    sc.sequenceFile[String, String](args(0)).map {
      case (k, v) => (langIndep(k), v)
    }
    .groupByKey(args(2).toInt)
    .filter {
      case (_, vs) => vs.size > 1
    }
    .saveAsTextFile(args(1))
  }
}

And I am running it with the command as follows:

sbt/sbt "run-main ccminer.ccminer s3n://aws-publicdatasets/common-crawl/parse-output/segment/1341690165636/textData-* s3n://parallelcorpus/out/ 2000"

But very quickly it fails with errors as follows

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at com.ning.compress.BufferRecycler.allocEncodingBuffer(BufferRecycler.java:59)
at com.ning.compress.lzf.ChunkEncoder.<init>(ChunkEncoder.java:93)
at com.ning.compress.lzf.impl.UnsafeChunkEncoder.<init>(UnsafeChunkEncoder.java:40)
at com.ning.compress.lzf.impl.UnsafeChunkEncoderLE.<init>(UnsafeChunkEncoderLE.java:13)
at com.ning.compress.lzf.impl.UnsafeChunkEncoders.createEncoder(UnsafeChunkEncoders.java:31)
at com.ning.compress.lzf.util.ChunkEncoderFactory.optimalInstance(ChunkEncoderFactory.java:44)
at com.ning.compress.lzf.LZFOutputStream.<init>(LZFOutputStream.java:61)
at org.apache.spark.io.LZFCompressionCodec.compressedOutputStream(CompressionCodec.scala:60)
at org.apache.spark.storage.BlockManager.wrapForCompression(BlockManager.scala:803)
at org.apache.spark.storage.BlockManager$$anonfun$5.apply(BlockManager.scala:471)
at org.apache.spark.storage.BlockManager$$anonfun$5.apply(BlockManager.scala:471)
at org.apache.spark.storage.DiskBlockObjectWriter.open(BlockObjectWriter.scala:117)
at org.apache.spark.storage.DiskBlockObjectWriter.write(BlockObjectWriter.scala:174)
at org.apache.spark.scheduler.ShuffleMapTask$$anonfun$runTask$1.apply(ShuffleMapTask.scala:164)
at org.apache.spark.scheduler.ShuffleMapTask$$anonfun$runTask$1.apply(ShuffleMapTask.scala:161)
at scala.collection.Iterator$class.foreach(Iterator.scala:727)
at scala.collection.AbstractIterator.foreach(Iterator.scala:1157)
at org.apache.spark.scheduler.ShuffleMapTask.runTask(ShuffleMapTask.scala:161)
at org.apache.spark.scheduler.ShuffleMapTask.runTask(ShuffleMapTask.scala:102)
at org.apache.spark.scheduler.Task.run(Task.scala:53)
at org.apache.spark.executor.Executor$TaskRunner$$anonfun$run$1.apply$mcV$sp(Executor.scala:213)
at org.apache.spark.deploy.SparkHadoopUtil.runAsUser(SparkHadoopUtil.scala:49)
at org.apache.spark.executor.Executor$TaskRunner.run(Executor.scala:178)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1145)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:615)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:744)

So my basic question is, what is necessary to write a Spark task that can group by key with an almost unlimited amount of input without running out of memory?

Answer 1

The most common cause of java.lang.OutOfMemoryError exceptions in shuffle tasks (such as groupByKey, reduceByKey, etc.) is low level of parallelism.

You can increase default value by setting spark.default.parallelism property in configuration.