ATuMm: Auto-tuning Memory Manager in Apache Spark

Abstract

Apache Spark is an in-memory analytic framework that has been adopted in the industry and research fields. Two memory managers, Static and Unified, are available in Spark to allocate memory for caching Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs) and executing tasks. However, we found that the static memory manager (SMM) lacks flexibility, while the unified memory manager (UMM) puts heavy pressure on the garbage collection of JVM on which Spark resides. To address these issues, we design an auto-tuning memory manager (ATuMm) to support dynamic memory allocation with the consideration of both memory demands and latency introduced by garbage collection. We implement our new memory manager in Spark 2.2.0 and evaluate it by conducting experiments in a real Spark cluster. Our experimental results show that our auto-tuning memory manager can reduce the total garbage collection time and thus further improve the performance (i.e., reduced latency) of Spark applications, compared to the existing Spark memory management solutions.