Best Practices

This article explains the most common best practices using the RAPIDS Accelerator, especially for performance tuning and troubleshooting.

By following Workload Qualification guide, you can identify the best candidate Spark applications for the RAPIDS Accelerator and also the feature gaps.

Based on Qualification tool’s output, you can start with the top N recommended CPU Spark jobs, especially if those jobs are computation heavy jobs (large joins, hash aggregates, windowing, sorting).

After those candidate jobs are run on GPU using the RAPIDS Accelerator, check the Spark driver log to find the not-supported messages starting with !. Some missing features might be enabled by turning on a configuration, but understand the corresponding limitations detailed in the advanced configuration document. For other unsupported features, file feature requests on spark-rapids GitHub repo with a minimum reproduce and the not-supported messages if they’re non-sensitive data.

Refer to Tuning Guide for more details.

Spark jobs running out of GPU memory is the most common issue because GPU memory is usually much smaller than host memory. Below are some common tips to help avoid GPU OOM issues.

Reduce the number of concurrent tasks per GPU

This is controlled by spark.rapids.sql.concurrentGpuTasks. Try to decrease this value to 1. If the job still hit OOMs, try the following steps.

Install CUDA 11.5 or above version

The default value for spark.rapids.memory.gpu.pool is changed to ASYNC from ARENA for CUDA 11.5+. For CUDA 11.4 and older, it will fall back to ARENA. Using ASYNC allocator can avoid some memory fragmentation issues.

The Spark executor log will contain a message like the following when using the ASYNC allocator:

            

            
INFO GpuDeviceManager: Initializing RMM ASYNC pool size = 17840.349609375 MB on gpuId 0
        

Identify that SQL, job and stage is involved in the error

The relationship between SQL/job/stage is: Stage belongs to a Job that belongs to SQL. First check the Spark UI to identify the problematic SQL ID, Job ID, and Stage ID.

Then find the failed stage in the Stages page in the Spark UI, and go into that stage to look at tasks. If some tasks completed successfully while some tasks failed with OOM, check the amount of input bytes or shuffle bytes read per task to see if there is any data skew.

Check the DAG of the problematic stage to see if there are any suspicious operators that may consume huge amounts of memory, such as windowing, collect_list/collect_set, explode, expand, etc.

Increase the number of tasks/partitions based on the type of the problematic stage

Table Scan Stage

If it’s a table scan stage on Parquet/ORC tables, then the number of tasks or partitions is normally determined by spark.sql.files.maxPartitionBytes. We can decrease its value to increase the number of tasks or partitions for this stage so that the memory pressure of each task is less.

Iceberg or Delta tables may have different settings to control the concurrency in the table scan stage. For example, Iceberg uses read.split.target-size as a table property or read option to control the split size.

Shuffle Stage

If it’s a shuffle stage, then the number of tasks or partitions is normally determined by spark.sql.shuffle.partitions (default value=200), and also AQE’s Coalescing Post Shuffle Partitions feature (such as parameters spark.sql.adaptive.coalescePartitions.minPartitionSize, spark.sql.adaptive.advisoryPartitionSizeInBytes, and so on).

We can adjust the above parameters to increase the number of tasks or partitions for this shuffle stage to reduce the memory pressure for each task. For example, we can start with increasing spark.sql.shuffle.partitions by a factor of 2, then 4, then 8, and so one.

Even without an OOM error, if the SQL plan metrics show lots of spilling from the Spark UI in this stage, increasing the number of tasks or partitions could decrease the spilled data size to improve performance.

Reduce columnar batch size and file reader batch size

Please refer to the Tuning Guide for details on the following RAPIDS parameters:

            

            
spark.rapids.sql.batchSizeBytes
spark.rapids.sql.reader.batchSizeBytes
        

File an issue or ask a question on the GitHub repo

If you are still getting an OOM exception, get the Spark eventlog and stack trace from the executor (the whole executor log ideally) and send to spark-rapids-support@nvidia.com , or file a GitHub issue on spark-rapids GitHub repo if it isn’t sensitive. Or, open a discussion thread.