I was asked to diagnose and tune a long and complex ad-hoc Hive query that spent more than 4 hours on the reduce stage. The fetch from the map tasks and the merge phase completed fairly quickly (within 10 minutes) and the reducers spent most of their time iterating the input rows and performing the aggregations defined by the query – MIN, SUM, COUNT and PERCENTILE_APPROX and others on the specific columns.
After the merge phase a Tez reducer does not output many log records to help you diagnose the performance issues and find the bottlenecks. In this article I will describe how you can profile an already running Tez task without restarting the job.