Yes there is performance impact. It should be visible from the graph I attached. Basically, the CPU is spending much more time on System and the User time is lowered.
When this happens (if I don't do a drop_caches in time) the MR job winds up taking significantly longer than usual. On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 8:06 PM, Bharath Mundlapudi <bharathw...@yahoo.com>wrote: > Are you seeing any performance impact with this cache increase? It is > normal in linux system to grab high cache level. > > -Bharath > > ------------------------------ > *From:* Andy Isaacson <a...@cloudera.com> > *To:* user@hadoop.apache.org > *Sent:* Monday, December 10, 2012 11:23 AM > *Subject:* Re: Strange machine behavior > > What kernel did you see this on? Was there significant swap traffic > (si/so in vmstat output) during the high-system-time period? > > BTW, you don't need to nor do you want to run sync(1) when > manipulating drop_caches, it just causes additional noise and > slowdown. drop_caches doesn't have any impact on correctness; it won't > cause data loss (by dropping a dirty page or whatever). I've had sync > calls take 10 minutes to complete, so the unnecessary impact can be > significant. > > -andy > > On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Robert Dyer <rd...@iastate.edu> wrote: > > Has anyone experienced a TaskTracker/DataNode behaving like the attached > > image? > > > > This was during a MR job (which runs often). Note the extremely high > System > > CPU time. Upon investigating I saw that out of 64GB ram the system had > > allocated almost 45GB to cache! > > > > I did a sudo sh -c "sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_cache ; sync" > which is > > roughly where the graph goes back to normal (much lower System, much > higher > > User). > > > > This has happened a few times. > > > > I have tried playing with the sysctl vm.swappiness value (default of 60) > by > > setting it to 30 (which it was at when the graph was collected) and now > to > > 10. I am not sure that helps. > > > > Any ideas? Anyone else run into this before? > > > > 24 cores > > 64GB ram > > 4x2TB sata3 hdd > > > > Running Hadoop 1.0.4, with a DataNode (2gb heap), TaskTracker (2gb heap) > on > > this machine. > > > > 24 map slots (1gb heap each), no reducers. > > > > Also running HBase 0.94.2 with a RS (8gb ram) on this machine. > > > -- Robert Dyer rd...@iastate.edu
