Apache Spark does not delete temporary directories

Question

After a spark program completes, there are 3 temporary directories remain in the temp directory. The directory names are like this: spark-2e389487-40cc-4a82-a5c7-353c0feefbb7

The directories are empty.

And when the Spark program runs on Windows, a snappy DLL file also remains in the temp directory. The file name is like this: snappy-1.0.4.1-6e117df4-97b6-4d69-bf9d-71c4a627940c-snappyjava

They are created every time the Spark program runs. So the number of files and directories keeps growing.

How can let them be deleted?

Spark version is 1.3.1 with Hadoop 2.6.

UPDATE

I've traced the spark source code.

The module methods that create the 3 'temp' directories are as follows:

• DiskBlockManager.createLocalDirs
• HttpFileServer.initialize
• SparkEnv.sparkFilesDir

They (eventually) call Utils.getOrCreateLocalRootDirs and then Utils.createDirectory, which intentionally does NOT mark the directory for automatic deletion.

The comment of createDirectory method says: "The directory is guaranteed to be newly created, and is not marked for automatic deletion."

I don't know why they are not marked. Is this really intentional?

Answer 1

Three SPARK_WORKER_OPTS exists to support the worker application folder cleanup, copied here for further reference: from Spark Doc

• spark.worker.cleanup.enabled, default value is false, Enable periodic cleanup of worker / application directories. Note that this only affects standalone mode, as YARN works differently. Only the directories of stopped applications are cleaned up.

• spark.worker.cleanup.interval, default is 1800, i.e. 30 minutes, Controls the interval, in seconds, at which the worker cleans up old application work dirs on the local machine.

• spark.worker.cleanup.appDataTtl, default is 7*24*3600 (7 days), The number of seconds to retain application work directories on each worker. This is a Time To Live and should depend on the amount of available disk space you have. Application logs and jars are downloaded to each application work dir. Over time, the work dirs can quickly fill up disk space, especially if you run jobs very frequently.

Answer 2

I assume you are using the "local" mode only for testing purposes. I solved this issue by creating a custom temp folder before running a test and then I delete it manually (in my case I use local mode in JUnit so the temp folder is deleted automatically).

You can change the path to the temp folder for Spark by spark.local.dir property.

SparkConf conf = new SparkConf().setMaster("local")                                 .setAppName("test")                                 .set("spark.local.dir", "/tmp/spark-temp"); 

After the test is completed I would delete the /tmp/spark-temp folder manually.

Answer 3

I don't know how to make Spark cleanup those temporary directories, but I was able to prevent the creation of the snappy-XXX files. This can be done in two ways:

1. Disable compression. Properties: spark.broadcast.compress, spark.shuffle.compress, spark.shuffle.spill.compress. See http://spark.apache.org/docs/1.3.1/configuration.html#compression-and-serialization
2. Use LZF as a compression codec. Spark uses native libraries for Snappy and lz4. And because of the way JNI works, Spark has to unpack these libraries before using them. LZF seems to be implemented natively in Java.

I'm doing this during development, but for production it is probably better to use compression and have a script to clean up the temp directories.