reuse JVM in Hadoop mapreduce jobs

Question

I know we can set the property "mapred.job.reuse.jvm.num.tasks" to re-use JVM. My questions are:

(1) how to decide the number of tasks to be set here, -1 or some other positive integers?

(2) is it a good idea to already reuse JVMs and set this property to the value of -1 in mapreduce jobs?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

If you have very small tasks that are definitely running after each other, it is useful to set this property to -1 (meaning that a spawned JVM will be reused unlimited times). So you just spawn (number of task in your cluster available to your job)-JVMs instead of (number of tasks)-JVMs.

This is a huge performance improvement. In long running jobs the percentage of the runtime in comparision to setup a new JVM is very low, so it doesn't give you a huge performance boost.

Also in long running tasks it is good to recreate the task process, because of issues like heap fragmentation degrading your performance.

In addition, if you have some mid-time-running jobs, you could reuse just 2-3 of the tasks, having a good trade-off.