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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-18924?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=16009786#comment-16009786
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Dean Chen commented on SPARK-18924:
-----------------------------------

Great, we've been following the effort on 
https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/15821 and was hoping someone would tag on 
the R integration. 

Can the ArrowConverters logic that converts Spark InternalRows to an 
ArrowPayload be reused for the R interface as a quick start?  [~wesmckinn] 
would love to be able to replace our parquet with Arrow so there is the option 
to read data out of the data warehouse natively from R and Python without 
having to go through Spark SQL. That sounds like a longer term effort right? 

Would be happy to contribute on the Spark/Scala and R side to help speed up 
both efforts(don't have much internal bandwidth on the C++ side).

> Improve collect/createDataFrame performance in SparkR
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: SPARK-18924
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-18924
>             Project: Spark
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: SparkR
>            Reporter: Xiangrui Meng
>            Assignee: Xiangrui Meng
>            Priority: Critical
>
> SparkR has its own SerDe for data serialization between JVM and R.
> The SerDe on the JVM side is implemented in:
> * 
> [SerDe.scala|https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/api/r/SerDe.scala]
> * 
> [SQLUtils.scala|https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/sql/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/api/r/SQLUtils.scala]
> The SerDe on the R side is implemented in:
> * 
> [deserialize.R|https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/R/pkg/R/deserialize.R]
> * 
> [serialize.R|https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/R/pkg/R/serialize.R]
> The serialization between JVM and R suffers from huge storage and computation 
> overhead. For example, a short round trip of 1 million doubles surprisingly 
> took 3 minutes on my laptop:
> {code}
> > system.time(collect(createDataFrame(data.frame(x=runif(1000000)))))
>    user  system elapsed
>  14.224   0.582 189.135
> {code}
> Collecting a medium-sized DataFrame to local and continuing with a local R 
> workflow is a use case we should pay attention to. SparkR will never be able 
> to cover all existing features from CRAN packages. It is also unnecessary for 
> Spark to do so because not all features need scalability. 
> Several factors contribute to the serialization overhead:
> 1. The SerDe in R side is implemented using high-level R methods.
> 2. DataFrame columns are not efficiently serialized, primitive type columns 
> in particular.
> 3. Some overhead in the serialization protocol/impl.
> 1) might be discussed before because R packages like rJava exist before 
> SparkR. I'm not sure whether we have a license issue in depending on those 
> libraries. Another option is to switch to low-level R'C interface or Rcpp, 
> which again might have license issue. I'm not an expert here. If we have to 
> implement our own, there still exist much space for improvement, discussed 
> below.
> 2) is a huge gap. The current collect is implemented by `SQLUtils.dfToCols`, 
> which collects rows to local and then constructs columns. However,
> * it ignores column types and results boxing/unboxing overhead
> * it collects all objects to driver and results high GC pressure
> A relatively simple change is to implement specialized column builder based 
> on column types, primitive types in particular. We need to handle null/NA 
> values properly. A simple data structure we can use is
> {code}
> val size: Int
> val nullIndexes: Array[Int]
> val notNullValues: Array[T] // specialized for primitive types
> {code}
> On the R side, we can use `readBin` and `writeBin` to read the entire vector 
> in a single method call. The speed seems reasonable (at the order of GB/s):
> {code}
> > x <- runif(10000000) # 1e7, not 1e6
> > system.time(r <- writeBin(x, raw(0)))
>    user  system elapsed
>   0.036   0.021   0.059
> > > system.time(y <- readBin(r, double(), 10000000))
>    user  system elapsed
>   0.015   0.007   0.024
> {code}
> This is just a proposal that needs to be discussed and formalized. But in 
> general, it should be feasible to obtain 20x or more performance gain.



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