[ http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-331?page=comments#action_12442972 ] Doug Cutting commented on HADOOP-331: -------------------------------------
Unless I misunderstand, your step (3) involves a lot of random disk accesses, something we must avoid. Seek time dominates for accesses of less than 100k or so. Optimal performance will only be achieved if all disk operations are reads and writes of larger chunks. Sorting buffers before they are written is also important, since it eliminates a sort pass. Most map outputs can be sorted in just a few passes, often only one, so each pass is significant. > map outputs should be written to a single output file with an index > ------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Key: HADOOP-331 > URL: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-331 > Project: Hadoop > Issue Type: Improvement > Components: mapred > Affects Versions: 0.3.2 > Reporter: eric baldeschwieler > Assigned To: Devaraj Das > > The current strategy of writing a file per target map is consuming a lot of > unused buffer space (causing out of memory crashes) and puts a lot of burden > on the FS (many opens, inodes used, etc). > I propose that we write a single file containing all output and also write an > index file IDing which byte range in the file goes to each reduce. This will > remove the issue of buffer waste, address scaling issues with number of open > files and generally set us up better for scaling. It will also have > advantages with very small inputs, since the buffer cache will reduce the > number of seeks needed and the data serving node can open a single file and > just keep it open rather than needing to do directory and open ops on every > request. > The only issue I see is that in cases where the task output is substantiallyu > larger than its input, we may need to spill multiple times. In this case, we > can do a merge after all spills are complete (or during the final spill). -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators: http://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/Administrators.jspa - For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
