Hello,

*Context:*

We were seeing very aggressive preemption done by Fair Scheduler and 98% of
preemption activity is triggered due to slider queue's needs. Slider queue
is stable queue i.e its containers don't churn and it has been provided a
fair share guarantee of more than it needs (high weight & min share double
of its steady state needs). So it was puzzling to see it triggering
preemption. When I turned on debug logging of fair scheduler I noticed
scheduler demand update thread reporting unusually high demand from Slider
queue.

Initial thought was a bug in scheduler but later I concluded its Slider's
problem but not due to its own code but due to AMRMClient code. I can
deterministically reproduce the issue on my laptop running a pseudo
yarn+slider setup.  I traced it to an open issue
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YARN-3020.

*The problem: *

1. A region server fails for the first time, slider notices it
and registers a request to RM via AMRMClient for a new container. At this
time AMRMClient caches this allocation request with the 'Resource' (a data
structure with memory, cpu & priority) as key.
(source: AMRMClientImpl.java, cache is remoteRequestsTable)
2. A region server fails again, slider notices it and registers a request
to RM again via AMRMClient for a (one) new container. AMRMClient finds that
similar Resource request (the memory, cpu and priority for RS doesn't
change obviously) in its cache, add +1 to the container count before
putting it over wire.*NOTE*: Slider didn't need 2 containers, but ends up
receiving 2. When containers are allocated, slider keeps one and discards
one.
3. As explained in YARN-3020, with subsequent failures we will keep asking
for more and more containers when in reality we always need one.

For fair scheduler this means demand keeps going up. It doesn't know that
slider ends up discarding the surplus containers. In order to satisfy the
demand it kills mercilessly. Needless to say this will not be just
triggered by container failure, even flexing should trigger this.

*The fix: *

Rumor is that AMRMClient doesn't have a bug, its intended behaviour
(source: comments in  YARN-3020). The claim is that on receiving container
client should clear the cache by calling a method called
'removeContainerRequest'. Slider isn't following the protocol correctly, in
Slider's defense the protocol is not well defined.

Thoughts?
--
Shrijeet

Reply via email to