Hey Matei and Imran,

I think may be we can solve the problem without downgrading to 2.1.0 may by
capturing dissociation and then setting a timeout if it associates again we
keep moving else we shutdown the executor. This timeout can ofcourse be
configurable.

Thoughts ?


On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 3:29 AM, Matei Zaharia <[email protected]>wrote:

> Hey Imran,
>
> Good to know that Akka 2.1 handles this — that at least will give us a
> start.
>
> In the old code, executors certainly did get flagged as “down”
> occasionally, but that was due to a timeout we controlled (we keep sending
> heartbeats back and forth to track them). The timeout used to be smaller
> and usually the reason to exceed it was GC. However, if Akka 2.2 can
> sometimes drop the connections itself, this is a problem and we either have
> to use the reliable proxies for everything or see if we can configure it
> otherwise. Anyway, we’ll definitely look into it.
>
> Matei
>
> On Nov 1, 2013, at 1:09 PM, Imran Rashid <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I downgraded spark to akka 2.1.0, and everything seems to work now.  I'm
> going to run my tests a few more times , but I'd really have expected to
> see a failure by now w/ the 2.2.3 version.
>
> I'll submit a patch shortly (need to fix some compile errors in streaming
> still).
>
> Matei -- I think I realize now that when you were talking about the
> expectation of a tcp connection staying alive, you were explaining why this
> is *not* a bug in the current release.  You wouldn't end up in a situation
> where the executor thinks it finished the task, but the driver doesn't know
> about it, b/c if the connection dies, the executor wil get restarted.  That
> makes sense.  But, it seems like if we upgrade to akka 2.2.x, a lot of
> things change.  I was probably wrong about seeing that problem in previous
> releases -- it was just a vague recollection, which fit my current
> theories, so I jumped to conclusions.
>
> thanks everyone
>
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 9:27 AM, Imran Rashid <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> thanks everyone for all of the input.
>>
>> Matei: makes a lot more sense with your explanation of spark's expected
>> behavior of tcp, I can see why this makes sense now.  But, to show my total
>> ignorance here, I'm wondering that when the connection does break, are you
>> sure all of your messages that you thought you sent before the break were
>> received?  I'm guessing that you don't.  Which is fine, if the response to
>> that is to have the executor just die completely, and restart.  that was
>> the behavior I was initially observing with the code on the 2.10 branch,
>> where the executor handles a DisassociatedEvent explicitly, and dies.
>>
>> But -- is that the behavior we want?  do we want it to be robust to tcp
>> connections breaking, without having to completely restart the executor?
>> you might say that dying & restarting will lead to correct behavior, even
>> if its inefficient.  But sometimes, I've seen restarts so frequently that
>> no progress is made.
>>
>> I don't see why this changed w/ the different versions of akka -- I don't
>> see any relevant configuration settings that would change how "strongly"
>> tcp tries to keep the connection alive, but I may be missing something.
>> But it does seem like the netty configuration options have changed
>> completely between the two versions:
>>
>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.3/scala/remoting.html#Remote_Configuration
>> vs
>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.0.5/scala/remoting.html
>>
>> btw, akka 2.1.0 also has been built for scala 2.10:
>>
>> http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails|com.typesafe.akka|akka-remote_2.10|2.1.0|bundle
>> and its netty configuration is closer to 2.0.5:
>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.1.0/scala/remoting.html
>>
>> perhaps someone more knowledge then me about netty & tcp can look through
>> the changes and decide what the right changes are.
>>
>> Prashant said:
>> >Before we conclude something about reliable messaging, I want you to for
>> once consider other possibilities like >actual network reconnection and may
>> be a GC pause ? Try connecting something like jconsole (or alike ) and >see
>> what happens on the driver and executor.
>> >
>> >My doubt are since we are using standalone mode where even master and
>> worker are also actors then if we see >a weird behaviour on the executor
>> and driver then Why not on master and worker too ? They should also break
>> >away from each other. For this reason, I am doubting our conclusions and
>> may be if we narrow down the >problem first before we conclude something.
>> It is a regression in akka 2.2.3 it uses more memory than it used to >be in
>> 2.1.x.
>> >See https://github.com/akka/akka/issues/1810
>>
>>
>> Well, there could easily be the same problem with dropped connections
>> between master & worker -- they just communicate so little, it doesn't
>> really matter.  The odds that a message gets dropped between them is very
>> low, only because there are barely any messages.
>>
>> I completely agree that the problem could be because of a contention, or
>> gc pause, etc.  In fact, I'm only giving spark 24 out of 32 cores available
>> on each box, and 90g out of 125g memory.  I've looked at gc a little with
>> jstat, and I did see some gc pauses but nothing ridiculous.
>>
>> But, I think the question remains.  Suppose it is gc pauses, etc. that
>> cause the disassociation events; what do we do to fix it?  How can we
>> diagnose the problem, and figure out which of the configuration variables
>> to tune?  clearly, there *will be* long gc pauses, and the networking layer
>> needs to be able to deal with them.
>>
>> still I understand your desire to see if that might be the cause of the
>> problem in this particular case, so I will dig a little more.
>>
>>
>> (btw, should I move this thread to the dev list now?  it is getting into
>> the nitty-gritty of implementation ...)
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 1:15 AM, Matei Zaharia <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, so far they’ve been built on that assumption — not that Akka would
>>> *guarantee* delivery in that as soon as the send() call returns you know
>>> it’s delivered, but that Akka would act the same way as a TCP socket,
>>> allowing you to send a stream of messages in order and hear when the
>>> connection breaks. Maybe that isn’t what they want to provide, but I'd find
>>> it weird, because it’s very easy to write a server with this property.
>>>
>>> Matei
>>>
>>> On Oct 31, 2013, at 9:58 PM, Sriram Ramachandrasekaran <
>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Sorry if I my understanding is wrong. May be, for this particular case
>>> it might be something to do with the load/network, but, in general, are you
>>> saying that, we build these communication channels(block manager
>>> communication, task events communication, etc) assuming akka would take
>>> care of it? I somehow feel that, it's being overly optimistic. Correct me
>>> if I am wrong.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Matei Zaharia 
>>> <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>
>>>> It’s true that Akka’s delivery guarantees are in general at-most-once,
>>>> but if you look at the text there it says that they differ by transport. In
>>>> the previous version, I’m quite sure that except maybe in very rare
>>>> circumstances or cases where we had a bug, Akka’s remote layer always kept
>>>> connections up between each pair of hosts. So the guarantee was that as
>>>> long as you haven’t received a “disconnected” event, your messages are
>>>> being delivered, though of course when you do receive that event you don’t
>>>> know which messages have really made it through unless you acked them. But
>>>> that didn’t matter for our use case — from our point of view an executor
>>>> was either up or down.
>>>>
>>>> For this reason I still think it should be possible to configure Akka
>>>> to do the same on 2.2. Most likely some timeouts just got lower. With large
>>>> heaps you can easily get a GC pause of 60 seconds, so these timeouts should
>>>> be in the minutes.
>>>>
>>>> If for some reason this isn’t the case, then we have a bigger problem —
>>>> there are *lots* of messages beyond task-finished that need to be sent
>>>> reliably, including things like block manager events (a block was added /
>>>> removed on this node) and commands to tell the block manager to drop data.
>>>> It would be silly to implement acks at the application level for all these.
>>>> But I doubt this is the case. Prashant’s observation that the standalone
>>>> cluster manager stayed up is a further sign that this might be due to GC.
>>>>
>>>> Matei
>>>>
>>>> On Oct 31, 2013, at 9:11 PM, Sriram Ramachandrasekaran <
>>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Imran,
>>>> Just to add, we've noticed dis-associations in a couple projects that
>>>> we built(using akka 2.2.x not spark). We went to some details to find out
>>>> what was happening. As Matei, suggested, Akka keeps the TCP connection open
>>>> and uses that to talk to peers. We noticed that in our case, initially, we
>>>> were seeing dis-associations generally at the end of keep-alive duration.
>>>> So, when the keep-alive duration ends, at the TCP layer, a keep-alive probe
>>>> gets sent to inform the peer on the other side that the connection is still
>>>> alive/valid. For some reason, the probe dint renew the keep-alive
>>>> connection and we saw a lot of dis-associations during that time. Later, we
>>>> realized this was not a pattern either. This 
>>>> thread<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/akka-user/RYxaPl_nby4/1USHDFIRgOkJ>contains
>>>>  the full history of our discussions with the Akka team. It's still
>>>> open and unclear as to what was causing it for our case.
>>>> We tried tweaking various settings of akka(wrt heartbeats, failure
>>>> detector, even plugged-in our own failure detector with no effect).
>>>>
>>>> Imran - Just to clarify your point on message delivery - akka's message
>>>> delivery policy is at-most-once. However, there's no guarantee for a
>>>> message to be delivered to a peer. The documentation clearly explains that.
>>>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.0.2/general/message-send-semantics.html. 
>>>> It's
>>>> the responsibility of the application developer to handle cases where
>>>> message is suspected to be not have been delivered.
>>>>
>>>> I hope this helps.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 8:35 AM, Imran Rashid <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> unfortunately that change wasn't the silver bullet I was hoping for.
>>>>> Even with
>>>>> 1) ignoring DisassociatedEvent
>>>>> 2) executor uses ReliableProxy to send messages back to driver
>>>>> 3) turn up akka.remote.watch-failure-detector.threshold=12
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> there is a lot of weird behavior.  First, there are a few
>>>>> DisassociatedEvents, but some that are followed by AssociatedEvents, so
>>>>> that seems ok.  But sometimes the re-associations are immediately followed
>>>>> by this:
>>>>>
>>>>> 13/10/31 18:51:10 INFO executor.StandaloneExecutorBackend: got
>>>>> lifecycleevent: AssociationError 
>>>>> [akka.tcp://sparkExecutor@<executor>:41441]
>>>>> -> [akka.tcp://spark@<driver>:41321]: Error [Invalid address:
>>>>> akka.tcp://spark@<driver>:41321] [
>>>>> akka.remote.InvalidAssociation: Invalid address:
>>>>> akka.tcp://spark@<driver>:41321
>>>>> Caused by:
>>>>> akka.remote.transport.Transport$InvalidAssociationException: The remote
>>>>> system has quarantined this system. No further associations to the remote
>>>>> system are possible until this system is restarted.
>>>>> ]
>>>>>
>>>>> On the driver, there are messages like:
>>>>>
>>>>> [INFO] [10/31/2013 18:51:07.838]
>>>>> [spark-akka.actor.default-dispatcher-3] [Remoting] Address [
>>>>> akka.tcp://sparkExecutor@<executor>:46123] is now quarantined, all
>>>>> messages to this address will be delivered to dead letters.
>>>>> [WARN] [10/31/2013 18:51:10.845]
>>>>> [spark-akka.actor.default-dispatcher-20] 
>>>>> [akka://spark/system/remote-watcher]
>>>>> Detected unreachable: [akka.tcp://sparkExecutor@<executor>:41441]
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> and when the driver does decide that the executor has been terminated,
>>>>> it removes the executor, but doesn't start another one.
>>>>>
>>>>> there are a ton of messages also about messages to the block manager
>>>>> master ... I'm wondering if there are other parts of the system that need
>>>>> to use a reliable proxy (or some sort of acknowledgement).
>>>>>
>>>>> I really don't think this was working properly even w/ previous
>>>>> versions of spark / akka.  I'm still learning about akka, but I think you
>>>>> always need an ack to be confident w/ remote communicate.  Perhaps the old
>>>>> version of akka just had more robust defaults or something, but I bet it
>>>>> could still have the same problems.  Even before, I have seen the driver
>>>>> thinking there were running tasks, but nothing happening on any executor 
>>>>> --
>>>>> it was just rare enough (and hard to reproduce) that I never bothered
>>>>> looking into it more.
>>>>>
>>>>> I will keep digging ...
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Matei Zaharia <
>>>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> BTW the problem might be the Akka failure detector settings that seem
>>>>>> new in 2.2: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.3/scala/remoting.html
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Their timeouts seem pretty aggressive by default — around 10 seconds.
>>>>>> This can easily be too little if you have large garbage collections. We
>>>>>> should make sure they are higher than our own node failure detection
>>>>>> timeouts.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Matei
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Oct 31, 2013, at 1:33 PM, Imran Rashid <[email protected]>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> pretty sure I found the problem -- two problems actually.  And I
>>>>>> think one of them has been a general lurking problem w/ spark for a 
>>>>>> while.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1)  we should ignore disassociation events, as you suggested
>>>>>> earlier.  They seem to just indicate a temporary problem, and can 
>>>>>> generally
>>>>>> be ignored.  I've found that they're regularly followed by
>>>>>> AssociatedEvents, and it seems communication really works fine at that
>>>>>> point.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 2) Task finished messages get lost.  When this message gets sent, we
>>>>>> dont' know it actually gets there:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://github.com/apache/incubator-spark/blob/scala-2.10/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/executor/StandaloneExecutorBackend.scala#L90
>>>>>>
>>>>>> (this is so incredible, I feel I must be overlooking something -- but
>>>>>> there is no ack somewhere else that I'm overlooking, is there??)  So, 
>>>>>> after
>>>>>> the patch, spark wasn't hanging b/c of the unhandled DisassociatedEvent.
>>>>>> It hangs b/c the executor has sent some taskFinished messages that never
>>>>>> get received by the driver.  So the driver is waiting for some tasks to
>>>>>> finish, but the executors think they are all done.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm gonna add the reliable proxy pattern for this particular
>>>>>> interaction and see if its fixes the problem
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.3/contrib/reliable-proxy.html#introducing-the-reliable-proxy
>>>>>>
>>>>>> imran
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> It's just about how deep your longing is!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> It's just about how deep your longing is!
>>>
>>>
>
>


-- 
s

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