[
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1090?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13277867#comment-13277867
]
Catalin Alexandru Zamfir commented on AVRO-1090:
------------------------------------------------
We're now catching the NullPointerException and retrying to "create" or
"appendTo". This seems to fix it, but the NPE should require a check to see
where it's coming from. It passed writing 125M per 6 threads on 6 nodes. This
means over 1B records properly written via the patch to "appendTo". From our
point of view, it passes all possible use-cases. Doug, please consider
modifying SeekableFileInput to SeekableInput when you commit. Thanks again!
> DataFileWriter should expose "sync marker" to allow concurrent writes to same
> .avro file
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: AVRO-1090
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1090
> Project: Avro
> Issue Type: Bug
> Affects Versions: 1.6.3
> Reporter: Catalin Alexandru Zamfir
> Assignee: Doug Cutting
> Fix For: 1.7.0
>
> Attachments: AVRO-1090.patch, AVRO-1090.patch
>
>
> We're writing to Hadoop via DataFileWriter (FSDataOutputStream). We're doing
> this with two threads per node, on 8 nodes. Some of the nodes share the same
> path. For example, our: TimestampedWriter class, takes a path argument and
> appends the timestamp to it (ex: SomePath/2012/05/14). Thus, two threads or
> two nodes can access the same path. The "race" condition when these streams
> are written, is resolved with a check to see if the file exists (has been
> created) by a faster thread. If that's so, it appends, instead of creating
> the file on the HDFS.
> The problem is that DataFileWriter, generates a 16-byte, random string for
> each instance. So, two threads with 2 different writer instances, have a
> different sync marker. That means that data, when trying to read it back,
> will get an IOException ("Invalid sync!").
> There's a big performance penalty here. Because only one writer can write at
> once to one given path, it becomes a bottleneck. For 1B (billion) rows, it
> took us 4 hours to generate & load. With 20 concurrent threads, it took only
> 12.5 minutes.
> If DataFileWriter would expose the "sync" marker, a developer could read that
> and make sure that the next thread that appends to the file, uses the same
> sync marker. Don't know if it's even possible to expose the sync marker so as
> other instances of "DataFileWriter" can share the sync marker, from the file.
> We have a fix for this, making sure each writer is an "unique" instance and
> generating a path based on that uniqueness. But instead of having
> "SomePath/2012/05/14/Shard.avro" we'd now have
> "SomePath/2012/05/14/Shard-some-random-UUID.avro" for each of the writers
> that write the data in.
> If it can be done, it would be a huge fix for a bottleneck problem. The
> bottleneck being the single writer that can write to a single path.
> THIS HAS ALSO been requested on the avro-user thread:
> http://grokbase.com/t/avro/user/122m4sjm1y/is-it-possible-to-append-to-an-already-existing-avro-file
> I just could not find the JIRA ticket for this request.
--
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ContactAdministrators!default.jspa
For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
