Spark when union a lot of RDD throws stack overflow error

Question

When I use "++" to combine a lot of RDDs, I got error stack over flow error.

Spark version 1.3.1 Environment: yarn-client. --driver-memory 8G

The number of RDDs is more than 4000. Each RDD is read from a text file with size of 1 GB.

It is generated in this way

val collection = (for (
  path <- files
) yield sc.textFile(path)).reduce(_ union _)

It works fine when files has small size. And there is the error

The error repeats itself. I guess it is a recursion function which is called too many time?

 Exception at org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD.partitions(RDD.scala:217)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.UnionRDD$$anonfun$1.apply(UnionRDD.scala:66)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.UnionRDD$$anonfun$1.apply(UnionRDD.scala:66)
    at scala.collection.TraversableLike$$anonfun$map$1.apply(TraversableLike.scala:244)
    at scala.collection.TraversableLike$$anonfun$map$1.apply(TraversableLike.scala:244)
    at scala.collection.IndexedSeqOptimized$class.foreach(IndexedSeqOptimized.scala:33)
    at scala.collection.mutable.WrappedArray.foreach(WrappedArray.scala:34)
    at scala.collection.TraversableLike$class.map(TraversableLike.scala:244)
    at scala.collection.AbstractTraversable.map(Traversable.scala:105)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.UnionRDD.getPartitions(UnionRDD.scala:66)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD$$anonfun$partitions$2.apply(RDD.scala:219)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD$$anonfun$partitions$2.apply(RDD.scala:217)
    at scala.Option.getOrElse(Option.scala:120)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD.partitions(RDD.scala:217)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.UnionRDD$$anonfun$1.apply(UnionRDD.scala:66)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.UnionRDD$$anonfun$1.apply(UnionRDD.scala:66)
    at scala.collection.TraversableLike$$anonfun$map$1.apply(TraversableLike.scala:244)
    at scala.collection.TraversableLike$$anonfun$map$1.apply(TraversableLike.scala:244)
    at scala.collection.IndexedSeqOptimized$class.foreach(IndexedSeqOptimized.scala:33)
    at scala.collection.mutable.WrappedArray.foreach(WrappedArray.scala:34)
    at scala.collection.TraversableLike$class.map(TraversableLike.scala:244)
    at scala.collection.AbstractTraversable.map(Traversable.scala:105)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.UnionRDD.getPartitions(UnionRDD.scala:66)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD$$anonfun$partitions$2.apply(RDD.scala:219)
    at org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD$$anonfun$partitions$2.apply(RDD.scala:217)
    at scala.Option.getOrElse(Option.scala:120)
  .....

Answer 1

Use SparkContext.union(...) instead to union many RDDs at once.

You don't want to do it one at a time like that since RDD.union() creates a new step in the lineage (an extra set of stack frames on any computation) for each RDD, whereas SparkContext.union() makes it all at once. This will insure not getting a stack-overflow error.

Answer 2

It seems that when union RDD one by one can get into a series of very long recursive function calls. In this case we need to increase JVM stack memory. In spark with option --driver-java-options "-Xss 100M", driver jvm stack memory is configured to 100M.

Sean Owen's solution also solves the problem in more elegant way.