Just a comment from the peanut gallery, but these buffers are a real PITA for us as well. Probably 75% of our non-user-error job failures are related to them.
Just naively, what about not doing compression on the fly? E.g. during the shuffle just write straight to disk, uncompressed? For us, we always have plenty of disk space, and if you're concerned about network transmission, you could add a separate compress step after the blocks have been written to disk, but before being sent over the wire. Granted, IANAE, so perhaps this is a bad idea; either way, awesome to see work in this area! - Stephen
