[HIVE-10036] Writing ORC format big table causes OOM - too many fixed sized stream buffers

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Patch Available
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Labels: orcfile
• Assignee: Selina Zhang
• Reporter: Selina Zhang
• Created: 20/Mar/15 18:36
• Updated: 11/May/15 04:10

Description

ORC writer keeps multiple out steams for each column. Each output stream is allocated fixed size ByteBuffer (configurable, default to 256K). For a big table, the memory cost is unbearable. Specially when HCatalog dynamic partition involves, several hundreds files may be open and writing at the same time (same problems for FileSinkOperator).

Global ORC memory manager controls the buffer size, but it only got kicked in at 5000 rows interval. An enhancement could be done here, but the problem is reducing the buffer size introduces worse compression and more IOs in read path. Sacrificing the read performance is always not a good choice.

I changed the fixed size ByteBuffer to a dynamic growth buffer which up bound to the existing configurable buffer size. Most of the streams does not need large buffer so the performance got improved significantly. Comparing to Facebook's hive-dwrf, I monitored 2x performance gain with this fix.

Solving OOM for ORC completely maybe needs lots of effort , but this is definitely a low hanging fruit.

Issue Links

• links to: Review Board #32445