spark-optimization

---
name: spark-optimization
description: Optimize Apache Spark jobs with partitioning, caching, shuffle optimization, and memory tuning. Use when improving Spark performance, debugging slow jobs, or scaling data processing pipelines.
license: MIT
---

# Apache Spark Optimization

Production patterns for optimizing Apache Spark jobs including partitioning strategies, memory management, shuffle optimization, and performance tuning.

## When to Use This Skill

- Optimizing slow Spark jobs
- Tuning memory and executor configuration
- Implementing efficient partitioning strategies
- Debugging Spark performance issues
- Scaling Spark pipelines for large datasets
- Reducing shuffle and data skew

## Core Concepts

### 1. Spark Execution Model

```
Driver Program
    ↓
Job (triggered by action)
    ↓
Stages (separated by shuffles)
    ↓
Tasks (one per partition)
```

### 2. Key Performance Factors

| Factor            | Impact                | Solution                      |
| ----------------- | --------------------- | ----------------------------- |
| **Shuffle**       | Network I/O, disk I/O | Minimize wide transformations |
| **Data Skew**     | Uneven task duration  | Salting, broadcast joins      |
| **Serialization** | CPU overhead          | Use Kryo, columnar formats    |
| **Memory**        | GC pressure, spills   | Tune executor memory          |
| **Partitions**    | Parallelism           | Right-size partitions         |

## Quick Start

```python
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from pyspark.sql import functions as F

# Create optimized Spark session
spark = (SparkSession.builder
    .appName("OptimizedJob")
    .config("spark.sql.adaptive.enabled", "true")
    .config("spark.sql.adaptive.coalescePartitions.enabled", "true")
    .config("spark.sql.adaptive.skewJoin.enabled", "true")
    .config("spark.serializer", "org.apache.spark.serializer.KryoSerializer")
    .config("spark.sql.shuffle.partitions", "200")
    .getOrCreate())

# Read with optimized settings
df = (spark.read
    .format("parquet")
    .option("mergeSchema", "false")
    .load("s3://bucket/data/"))

# Efficient transformations
result = (df
    .filter(F.col("date") >= "2024-01-01")
    .select("id", "amount", "category")
    .groupBy("category")
    .agg(F.sum("amount").alias("total")))

result.write.mode("overwrite").parquet("s3://bucket/output/")
```

## Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in `references/details.md`. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

## Best Practices

### Do's

- **Enable AQE** - Adaptive query execution handles many issues
- **Use Parquet/Delta** - Columnar formats with compression
- **Broadcast small tables** - Avoid shuffle for small joins
- **Monitor Spark UI** - Check for skew, spills, GC
- **Right-size partitions** - 128MB - 256MB per partition

### Don'ts

- **Don't collect large data** - Keep data distributed
- **Don't use UDFs unnecessarily** - Use built-in functions
- **Don't over-cache** - Memory is limited
- **Don't ignore data skew** - It dominates job time
- **Don't use `.count()` for existence** - Use `.take(1)` or `.isEmpty()`