Github user pwendell commented on the pull request: https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/1056#issuecomment-46652485 Hey @sryza, that status update exists in the `CoarseGrainedExecutorBackend` interface mostly for historical reasons. The very first scheduler Spark had was mesos, and mesos offered a way to send control plan messages (like "my task is finished") through its own messaging system. So this control plan messaging in Spark was coupled with the cluster scheduler. These things don't really need to be coupled and longer term I'd actually like to see all of the control plane messages go directly from the executor to the driver to keep it simpler and avoid fragmentation between deploy modes. For your patch, I'd circumvent this interface rather than extending it. Instead, I'd just piggy back your status updates on top of the existing block manager heartbeat that goes directly to the driver. We've already started cramming other stuff in there because it's the one control-plan message that gets sent from executors to the driver that is _not_ the task status message. At least, that's the first attempt I'd make at this patch. A better solution would be to add a general heartbeat actor on the executor, similar to the one in the block manager, but a shared one that would heartbeat on behalf of all the components. That might not be too bad either.
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