This office hour shares a demo and compares two approaches, caching data directly in-memory into the Spark JVM versus storing data off-heap via an in-memory storage service like Alluxio
In the previous tutorial ”Getting Started with Spark Caching using Alluxio in 5 Minutes”, we demonstrated how to get started with Spark and Alluxio. To share more thoughts and experiments on how Alluxio enhances Spark workloads, this article focuses on how Alluxio helps to optimize the memory utilization of Spark applications. For users who are … Continued
Recently, Qunar deployed Alluxio with Spark in production and found that Alluxio enables Spark streaming jobs to run 15x to 300x faster. In their case study, they described how Alluxio improved their system architecture, and mentioned that some existing Spark jobs would slow down or would never finish because they would run out of memory. After using Alluxio, those jobs were able to finish, because the data could be stored in Alluxio, instead of within Spark.
In this blog, we show by saving RDDs in Alluxio, Alluxio can keep larger data sets in-memory for faster Spark applications, as well as enable sharing of RDDs across separate Spark applications.