Prashant, the problem seems to be that messages sent while we’re disassociated 
are lost. I think we’d have to just prevent disassociation altogether, or 
replace all remote actor refs with the reliable proxies (which sounds painful).

Matei

On Nov 1, 2013, at 7:53 PM, Prashant Sharma <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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 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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