Details
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Bug
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Status: Resolved
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Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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2.1.1
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None
Description
Right now with dynamic allocation spark starts by getting the number of executors it needs to run all the tasks in parallel (or the configured maximum) for that stage. After it gets that number it will never reacquire more unless either an executor dies, is explicitly killed by yarn or it goes to the next stage. The dynamic allocation manager has the concept of idle timeout. Currently this says if a task hasn't been scheduled on that executor for a configurable amount of time (60 seconds by default), then let that executor go. Note when it lets that executor go due to the idle timeout it never goes back to see if it should reacquire more.
This is a problem for multiple reasons:
1 . Things can happen in the system that are not expected that can cause delays. Spark should be resilient to these. If the driver is GC'ing, you have network delays, etc we could idle timeout executors even though there are tasks to run on them its just the scheduler hasn't had time to start those tasks. Note that in the worst case this allows the number of executors to go to 0 and we have a deadlock.
2. Internal Spark components have opposing requirements. The scheduler has a requirement to try to get locality, the dynamic allocation doesn't know about this and if it lets the executors go it hurts the scheduler from doing what it was designed to do. For example the scheduler first tries to schedule node local, during this time it can skip scheduling on some executors. After a while though the scheduler falls back from node local to scheduler on rack local, and then eventually on any node. So during when the scheduler is doing node local scheduling, the other executors can idle timeout. This means that when the scheduler does fall back to rack or any locality where it would have used those executors, we have already let them go and it can't scheduler all the tasks it could which can have a huge negative impact on job run time.
In both of these cases when the executors idle timeout we never go back to check to see if we need more executors (until the next stage starts). In the worst case you end up with 0 and deadlock, but generally this shows itself by just going down to very few executors when you could have 10's of thousands of tasks to run on them, which causes the job to take way more time (in my case I've seen it should take minutes and it takes hours due to only been left a few executors).
We should handle these situations in Spark. The most straight forward approach would be to not allow the executors to idle timeout when there are tasks that could run on those executors. This would allow the scheduler to do its job with locality scheduling. In doing this it also fixes number 1 above because you never can go into a deadlock as it will keep enough executors to run all the tasks on.
There are other approaches to fix this, like explicitly prevent it from going to 0 executors, that prevents a deadlock but can still cause the job to slowdown greatly. We could also change it at some point to just re-check to see if we should get more executors, but this adds extra logic, we would have to decide when to check, its also just overhead in letting them go and then re-acquiring them again and this would cause some slowdown in the job as the executors aren't immediately there for the scheduler to place things on.
