Maybe It would be nice that unpersist() ‘triggers’ the computations of other 
rdds that depends on it but not yet computed.
The pseudo code can be as follows:

 

unpersist()
{
    if (this rdd has not been persisted)
        return;
    for (all rdds that depends on this rdd but not yet computed)
        compute_that_rdd;
    do_actual_unpersist();
}



 

From: Daniel Siegmann [mailto:daniel.siegm...@velos.io] 
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2014 5:38 AM
To: user@spark.apache.org
Subject: Re: Question about RDD cache, unpersist, materialization

 

I've run into this issue. The goal of caching / persist seems to be to avoid 
recomputing an RDD when its data will be needed multiple times. However, once 
the following RDDs are computed the cache is no longer needed. The currently 
design provides no obvious way to detect when the cache is no longer needed so 
it can be discarded.

In the case of cache in memory, it may be handled by partitions being dropped 
(in LRU order) when memory fills up. I need to do some more experimentation to 
see if this really works well, or if allowing memory to fill up causes 
performance issues or possibly OOM errors if data isn't correctly freed.

In the case of persisting to disk, I'm not sure if there's a way to limit the 
disk space used for caching. Does anyone know if there is such a configuration 
option? This is a pressing issue for me - I have had jobs fail because nodes 
ran out of disk space.

 

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 2:26 AM, Nick Pentreath <nick.pentre...@gmail.com> 
wrote:

If you want to force materialization use .count()

 

Also if you can simply don't unpersist anything, unless you really need to free 
the memory 

—
Sent from Mailbox <https://www.dropbox.com/mailbox>  

 

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 5:13 AM, innowireless TaeYun Kim 
<taeyun....@innowireless.co.kr> wrote:

BTW, it is possible that rdd.first() does not compute the whole partitions. 
So, first() cannot be uses for the situation below. 

-----Original Message----- 
From: innowireless TaeYun Kim [mailto:taeyun....@innowireless.co.kr] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2014 11:40 AM 
To: user@spark.apache.org 
Subject: Question about RDD cache, unpersist, materialization 

Hi, 

What I (seems to) know about RDD persisting API is as follows: 
- cache() and persist() is not an action. It only does a marking. 
- unpersist() is also not an action. It only removes a marking. But if the 
rdd is already in memory, it is unloaded. 

And there seems no API to forcefully materialize the RDD without requiring a 
data by an action method, for example first(). 

So, I am faced with the following scenario. 

{ 
JavaRDD<T> rddUnion = sc.parallelize(new ArrayList<T>()); // create 
empty for merging 
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) 
{ 
JavaRDD<T2> rdd = sc.textFile(inputFileNames[i]); 
rdd.cache(); // Since it will be used twice, cache. 
rdd.map(...).filter(...).saveAsTextFile(outputFileNames[i]); // 
Transform and save, rdd materializes 
rddUnion = rddUnion.union(rdd.map(...).filter(...)); // Do another 
transform to T and merge by union 
rdd.unpersist(); // Now it seems not needed. (But needed actually) 
} 
// Here, rddUnion actually materializes, and needs all 10 rdds that 
already unpersisted. 
// So, rebuilding all 10 rdds will occur. 
rddUnion.saveAsTextFile(mergedFileName); 
} 

If rddUnion can be materialized before the rdd.unpersist() line and 
cache()d, the rdds in the loop will not be needed on 
rddUnion.saveAsTextFile(). 

Now what is the best strategy? 
- Do not unpersist all 10 rdds in the loop. 
- Materialize rddUnion in the loop by calling 'light' action API, like 
first(). 
- Give up and just rebuild/reload all 10 rdds when saving rddUnion. 

Is there some misunderstanding? 

Thanks. 



 




-- 

Daniel Siegmann, Software Developer
Velos

Accelerating Machine Learning


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