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In Hadoop when do reduce tasks start? Do they start after a certain percentage (threshold) of mappers complete? If so, is this threshold fixed? What kind of threshold is typically used?
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Reduce starts only after all the mapper have fished there task, Reducer have to communicate with all the mappers so it has to wait till the last mapper finished its task. however mapper starts transferring data to the moment it has completed its task.
The number of reducers depends on the configuration of the cluster, although you can limit the number of reducers used by your MapReduce job. A single reducer would indeed become a bottleneck in your MapReduce job if you are dealing with any significant amount of data.
The Algorithm MapReduce program executes in three stages, namely map stage, shuffle stage, and reduce stage. Map stage − The map or mapper's job is to process the input data. Generally the input data is in the form of file or directory and is stored in the Hadoop file system (HDFS).
It reduces the data on each mapper further to a simplified form before passing it downstream. This makes shuffling and sorting easier as there is less data to work with. Often, the combiner class is set to the reducer class itself, due to the cumulative and associative functions in the reduce function.
The reduce phase has 3 steps: shuffle, sort, reduce. Shuffle is where the data is collected by the reducer from each mapper. This can happen while mappers are generating data since it is only a data transfer. On the other hand, sort and reduce can only start once all the mappers are done. You can tell which one MapReduce is doing by looking at the reducer completion percentage: 0-33% means its doing shuffle, 34-66% is sort, 67%-100% is reduce. This is why your reducers will sometimes seem "stuck" at 33%-- it's waiting for mappers to finish.
Reducers start shuffling based on a threshold of percentage of mappers that have finished. You can change the parameter to get reducers to start sooner or later.
Why is starting the reducers early a good thing? Because it spreads out the data transfer from the mappers to the reducers over time, which is a good thing if your network is the bottleneck.
Why is starting the reducers early a bad thing? Because they "hog up" reduce slots while only copying data and waiting for mappers to finish. Another job that starts later that will actually use the reduce slots now can't use them.
You can customize when the reducers startup by changing the default value of mapred.reduce.slowstart.completed.maps in mapred-site.xml. A value of 1.00 will wait for all the mappers to finish before starting the reducers. A value of 0.0 will start the reducers right away. A value of 0.5 will start the reducers when half of the mappers are complete. You can also change mapred.reduce.slowstart.completed.maps on a job-by-job basis. In new versions of Hadoop (at least 2.4.1) the parameter is called is mapreduce.job.reduce.slowstart.completedmaps (thanks user yegor256).
Typically, I like to keep mapred.reduce.slowstart.completed.maps above 0.9 if the system ever has multiple jobs running at once. This way the job doesn't hog up reducers when they aren't doing anything but copying data. If you only ever have one job running at a time, doing 0.1 would probably be appropriate.
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The reduce phase can start long before a reducer is called. As soon as "a" mapper finishes the job, the generated data undergoes some sorting and shuffling (which includes call to combiner and partitioner). The reducer "phase" kicks in the moment post mapper data processing is started. As these processing is done, you will see progress in reducers percentage. However, none of the reducers have been called in yet. Depending on number of processors available/used, nature of data and number of expected reducers, you may want to change the parameter as described by @Donald-miner above.
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