Github user andrewor14 commented on the pull request: https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/126#issuecomment-37484584 This is not specifically related to your patch, but I think we can remove the MetadataCleaner in SparkContext that cleans up persisted RDDs periodically. In particular, if an RDD is explicitly persisted by a user, periodically cleaning up RDDs may destroy an RDD that is in fact still being used. It seems to me that it is the user's responsibility for cleaning up whatever they persist in the first place. (That said, doing it through finalize() is fine because the user has no other way of using it.)
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