Performance Tuning, Cost Optimization / Internals, Research by Dmitry Tolpeko
On one of my clusters I got my favorite YARN error, although now it was in a Flink application:
Container is running beyond physical memory limits. Current usage: 99.5 GB of 99.5 GB physical memory used; 105.1 GB of 227.8 GB virtual memory used. Killing container.
Why did the container take so much physical memory and fail? Let’s investigate in detail.
In the previous article about YARN container memory (see, Tez Memory Tuning – Container is Running Beyond Physical Memory Limits) I wrote about the physical memory. Now I would like to pay attention to the virtual memory in YARN.
A typical YARN memory error may look like this:
Container is running beyond virtual memory limits. Current usage: 1.0 GB of 1.1 GB physical memory used; 2.9 GB of 2.4 GB virtual memory used. Killing container.
So what is the virtual memory, how to solve such errors and why is the virtual memory size often so large?
I was asked to tune a Hive query that ran more than 10 hours. It was running on a 100 node cluster with 16 GB available for YARN containers on each node.
Although the query processed about 2 TB of input data, it did a fairly simple aggregation on user_id column and did not look too complex. It had 1 Map stage with 1,500 tasks and 1 Reduce stage with 7,000 tasks.
All map tasks completed within 30 minutes, and the query stuck on the Reduce phase. So what was wrong?
I had a SQL query that failed on one of the Presto 0.208 clusters with the “Query exceeded per-node total memory” (com.facebook.presto.ExceededMemoryLimitException) error. How can you solve this problem? I will consider a few possible solutions, but firstly let’s review the memory allocation in Presto.
Memory allocation in Hadoop YARN clusters has some drawbacks that may lead to significant cluster under-utilization and at the same time (!) to large queues of pending applications.
So you have to pay for extra compute resources that you do not use and still have unsatisfied users. Let’s see how this can happen and how you can mitigate this.
Analyzing a Hadoop cluster I noticed that it runs 2 GB and 4 GB containers only, and does not allocate the entire available memory to applications always leaving about 150 GB of free memory.
The clusters run Apache Pig and Hive applications, and the default settings (they are also inherited by Tez engine used by Pig and Hive):
-- from mapred-site.xml mapreduce.map.memory.mb 1408 mapreduce.reduce.memory.mb 2816 yarn.app.mapreduce.am.resource.mb 2816
Can reducing the Tez memory settings help solving memory limit problems? Sometimes this paradox works.
One day one of our Hive query failed with the following error: Container is running beyond physical memory limits. Current usage: 4.1 GB of 4 GB physical memory used; 6.0 GB of 20 GB virtual memory used. Killing container.