Sahil Takiar created IMPALA-9327:
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Summary: Data cache should be able to borrow spill-to-disk space
Key: IMPALA-9327
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IMPALA-9327
Project: IMPALA
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: Backend
Reporter: Sahil Takiar
Currently, users typically allocate a fixed amount of space for the data cache
and spill-to-disk using the configuration options {{--data_cache}} and
{{--scratch_dirs}}. For example, {{data_cache=/impala/cache:200GB}} and
{{scratch_dirs=/impala/scratch:200GB}}.
The issue with this type of static configuration is if there are no queries
that spill to disk, then that 200GB reserved for the scratch space will be
un-used. It would improve Impala performance and resource utilization if the
data cache was able to steal disk space from the spill-to-disk manager. The
space could be returned (e.g. data from the cache is evicted) to the
spill-to-disk manager, when required.
Users don't have to put a limit on the data_cache / scratch_dirs size (e.g. if
the 200GB was omitted Impala would just write files until there is no more disk
space left). The problem here is that there is no fairness policy between the
data cache and scratch space. What will likely happen is that the data cache
will consume all the disk capacity, leaving none for the scratch space. Impala
needs to have logic that allows disk space stealing, but still enforces a
minimum reserved disk capacity.
One issue with this approach is predictability. When queries start spilling,
performance can potentially be impacted since data from the cache will be
evicted. In practice, this may not be a big deal, especially since the data
evicted from the cache will be the least recently used data. However, we should
still think through the tradeoffs between predictability vs. performance /
utilization, and think of ways to expose metrics indicating that spill-to-disk
is taking space away from the data cache.
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