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High Memory Usage and Long GC Times When Writing Parquet Files

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#3,102 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java

Research direction

Start at the ExampleParquetWriter.builder entry point and trace the reported InternalParquetRecordWriter → ColumnWriterV1 → FallbackValuesWriter → PlainDoubleDictionaryValuesWriter → IntList chain. Compare the existing row-count and row-group settings with the concurrent writing scenario. Done should identify a supported way to reduce memory and GC overhead or clearly document why schema-related objects cannot be shared across threads.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Describe the usage question you have. Please include as many useful details as possible.

In my project, I am using the following code to write Parquet files to the server:

ParquetWriter parquetWriter = ExampleParquetWriter.builder(new Path(filePath))
.withConf(new Configuration())
.withType(messageType)
.build();

Each Parquet file contains 30000 columns. This code is executed by multiple threads simultaneously, which results in increased GC time. Upon analyzing memory usage, I found that the main memory consumers are related to the following chain:

InternalParquetRecordWriter -> ColumnWriterV1 -> FallbackValuesWriter -> PlainDoubleDictionaryValuesWriter -> IntList

Each thread writes to a file with the same table schema (header), differing only in the filePath.

I initially suspected that the memory usage was caused by the file buffer not being flushed in time. To address this, I tried configuring the writer with the following parameters:

parquetWriter = ExampleParquetWriter.builder(new Path(filePath))
.withConf(new Configuration())
.withType(messageType)
.withMinRowCountForPageSizeCheck(SpringContextUtils.getApplicationContext()
.getBean(EtlTaskProperties.class).getMinRowCountForPageSizeCheck())
.withMaxRowCountForPageSizeCheck(SpringContextUtils.getApplicationContext()
.getBean(EtlTaskProperties.class).getMaxRowCountForPageSizeCheck())
.withRowGroupSize(SpringContextUtils.getApplicationContext()
.getBean(EtlTaskProperties.class).getRowGroupSize())
.build();

However, these adjustments did not solve the issue. The program still experiences long GC pauses and excessive memory usage.

Expected Behavior

Efficient Parquet file writing with reduced GC time and optimized memory usage when multiple threads are writing files simultaneously.

Observed Behavior
• Increased GC time and excessive memory usage.
• Memory analysis indicates IntList under PlainDoubleDictionaryValuesWriter is the primary consumer of memory.

Request

What are the recommended strategies to mitigate excessive memory usage in this scenario?
Is there a way to share table schema-related objects across threads, or other optimizations to reduce memory overhead?

Please let me know if additional information is needed!

No response

Dominant language
Java
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