[MAPREDUCE-4946] Type conversion of map completion events leads to performance problems with large jobs

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.2-alpha, 0.23.5
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.3-alpha, 0.23.7
• Component/s: mr-am
• Target Version/s: 2.0.3-alpha, 0.23.7
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Assignee: Jason Darrell Lowe
• Reporter: Jason Darrell Lowe
• Created: 17/Jan/13 17:27
• Updated: 15/Feb/13 13:09
• Resolved: 22/Jan/13 19:09

Description

We've seen issues with large jobs (e.g.: 13,000 maps and 3,500 reduces) where reducers fail to connect back to the AM after being launched due to connection timeout. Looking at stack traces of the AM during this time we see a lot of IPC servers stuck waiting for a lock to get the application ID while type converting the map completion events. What's odd is that normally getting the application ID should be very cheap, but in this case we're type-converting thousands of map completion events for each reducer connecting. That means we end up type-converting the map completion events over 45 million times during the lifetime of the example job (13,000 * 3,500).

We either need to make the type conversion much cheaper (i.e.: lockless or at least read-write locked) or, even better, store the completion events in a form that does not require type conversion when serving them up to reducers.