Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By : Rishi Yadav
Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By: Rishi Yadav

Overview of this book

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data. Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark. Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using serialization to improve performance


Serialization plays an important part in distributed computing. There are two persistence (storage) levels that support serializing RDDs:

  • MEMORY_ONLY_SER: This stores RDDs as serialized objects. It will create one byte array per partition.
  • MEMORY_AND_DISK_SER: This is similar to MEMORY_ONLY_SER, but it spills partitions that do not fit in the memory to disk.

How to do it...

The following are the steps to add appropriate persistence levels:

  1. Start the Spark shell:
$ spark-shell
  1. Import the StorageLevel object as enumeration of persistence levels and the implicits associated with it:
scala> import org.apache.spark.storage.StorageLevel._
  1. Create a dataset:
scala> val words = spark.read.textFile("words")
  1. Persist the dataset:
scala> words.persist(MEMORY_ONLY_SER)

Though serialization reduces the memory footprint substantially, it adds extra CPU cycles due to deserialization.

Note

By default, Spark uses Java's serialization. Since the Java serialization is slow...