Thanks for the suggestions everyone, appreciate the advice. I tried replacing DISTINCT for the nested GROUP BY, running on 1.4 instead of 1.3, replacing the date casts with a "between" operation on the corresponding long constants instead and changing COUNT(*) to COUNT(1). None of these seem to have made any remarkable difference in running time for the query.
I'll hook up YourKit and see if we can figure out where the CPU time is going, then post back. On 22 June 2015 at 16:01, Yin Huai <yh...@databricks.com> wrote: > Hi James, > > Maybe it's the DISTINCT causing the issue. > > I rewrote the query as follows. Maybe this one can finish faster. > > select > sum(cnt) as uses, > count(id) as users > from ( > select > count(*) cnt, > cast(id as string) as id, > from usage_events > where > from_unixtime(cast(timestamp_millis/1000 as bigint)) between > '2015-06-09' and '2015-06-16' > group by cast(id as string) > ) tmp > > Thanks, > > Yin > > On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 12:55 PM, Jörn Franke <jornfra...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Generally (not only spark sql specific) you should not cast in the where >> part of a sql query. It is also not necessary in your case. Getting rid of >> casts in the whole query will be also beneficial. >> >> Le lun. 22 juin 2015 à 17:29, James Aley <james.a...@swiftkey.com> a >> écrit : >> >>> Hello, >>> >>> A colleague of mine ran the following Spark SQL query: >>> >>> select >>> count(*) as uses, >>> count (distinct cast(id as string)) as users >>> from usage_events >>> where >>> from_unixtime(cast(timestamp_millis/1000 as bigint)) >>> between '2015-06-09' and '2015-06-16' >>> >>> The table contains billions of rows, but totals only 64GB of data across >>> ~30 separate files, which are stored as Parquet with LZO compression in S3. >>> >>> From the referenced columns: >>> >>> * id is Binary, which we cast to a String so that we can DISTINCT by >>> it. (I was already told this will improve in a later release, in a separate >>> thread.) >>> * timestamp_millis is a long, containing a unix timestamp with >>> millisecond resolution >>> >>> This took nearly 2 hours to run on a 5 node cluster of r3.xlarge EC2 >>> instances, using 20 executors, each with 4GB memory. I can see from >>> monitoring tools that the CPU usage is at 100% on all nodes, but incoming >>> network seems a bit low at 2.5MB/s, suggesting to me that this is CPU-bound. >>> >>> Does that seem slow? Can anyone offer any ideas by glancing at the query >>> as to why this might be slow? We'll profile it meanwhile and post back if >>> we find anything ourselves. >>> >>> A side issue - I've found that this query, and others, sometimes >>> completes but doesn't return any results. There appears to be no error that >>> I can see in the logs, and Spark reports the job as successful, but the >>> connected JDBC client (SQLWorkbenchJ in this case), just sits there forever >>> waiting. I did a quick Google and couldn't find anyone else having similar >>> issues. >>> >>> >>> Many thanks, >>> >>> James. >>> >> >
