[SPARK-7410] Add option to avoid broadcasting configuration with newAPIHadoopFile

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 1.4.0
• Component/s: Spark Core
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Sandy Ryza
• Created: 06/May/15 23:28
• Updated: 09/Feb/16 00:45
• Resolved: 09/Feb/16 00:45

Description

I'm working with a Spark application that creates thousands of HadoopRDDs and unions them together. Certain details of the way the data is stored require this.

Creating ten thousand of these RDDs takes about 10 minutes, even before any of them is used in an action. I dug into why this takes so long and it looks like the overhead of broadcasting the Hadoop configuration is taking up most of the time. In this case, the broadcasting isn't helpful because each HadoopRDD only corresponds to one or two tasks. When I reverted the original change that switched to broadcasting configurations, the time it took to instantiate these RDDs improved 10x.

It would be nice if there was a way to turn this broadcasting off. Either through a Spark configuration option, a Hadoop configuration option, or an argument to hadoopFile / newAPIHadoopFile.