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Spark Tips & Tricks

Misc. Tips & Tricks

• If values are integers in [0, 255], Parquet will automatically compress to use 1 byte unsigned integers, thus decreasing the size of saved DataFrame by a factor of 8.
• Partition DataFrames to have evenly-distributed, ~128MB partition sizes (empirical finding). Always err on the higher side w.r.t. number of partitions.
• Pay particular attention to the number of partitions when using flatMap, especially if the following operation will result in high memory usage. The flatMap op usually results in a DataFrame with a [much] larger number of rows, yet the number of partitions will remain the same. Thus, if a subsequent op causes a large expansion of memory usage (i.e. converting a DataFrame of indices to a DataFrame of large Vectors), the memory usage per partition may become too high. In this case, it is beneficial to repartition the output of flatMap to a number of partitions that will safely allow for appropriate partition memory sizes, based upon the