Spark RDD default number of partitions

The minimum number of partitions is actually a lower bound set by the SparkContext. Since spark uses hadoop under the hood, Hadoop InputFormat` will still be the behaviour by default.

The first case should reflect defaultParallelism as mentioned here which may differ, depending on settings and hardware. (Numbers of cores, etc.)

So unless you provide the number of slices, that first case would be defined by the number described by sc.defaultParallelism:

scala> sc.defaultParallelism
res0: Int = 6

scala> sc.parallelize(1 to 100).partitions.size
res1: Int = 6

As for the second case, with sc.textFile, the number of slices by default is the minimum number of partitions.

Which is equal to 2 as you can see in this section of code.

Thus, you should consider the following :

• sc.parallelize will take numSlices or defaultParallelism.

• sc.textFile will take the maximum between minPartitions and the number of splits computed based on hadoop input split size divided by the block size.

  • sc.textFile calls sc.hadoopFile, which creates a HadoopRDD that uses InputFormat.getSplits under the hood [Ref. InputFormat documentation].

  • InputSplit[] getSplits(JobConf job, int numSplits) throws IOException : Logically split the set of input files for the job.
    Each InputSplit is then assigned to an individual Mapper for processing.
    Note: The split is a logical split of the inputs and the input files are not physically split into chunks. For e.g. a split could be tuple. Parameters: job – job configuration.
    numSplits – the desired number of splits, a hint. Returns: an array of InputSplits for the job. Throws: IOException.

Example:

Let’s create some dummy text files:

fallocate -l 241m bigfile.txt
fallocate -l 4G hugefile.txt

This will create 2 files, respectively, of size 241MB and 4GB.

We can see what happens when we read each of the files:

scala> val rdd = sc.textFile("bigfile.txt")
// rdd: org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD[String] = bigfile.txt MapPartitionsRDD[1] at textFile at <console>:27

scala> rdd.getNumPartitions
// res0: Int = 8

scala> val rdd2 = sc.textFile("hugefile.txt")
// rdd2: org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD[String] = hugefile.txt MapPartitionsRDD[3] at textFile at <console>:27

scala> rdd2.getNumPartitions
// res1: Int = 128

Both of them are actually HadoopRDDs:

scala> rdd.toDebugString
// res2: String = 
// (8) bigfile.txt MapPartitionsRDD[1] at textFile at <console>:27 []
//  |  bigfile.txt HadoopRDD[0] at textFile at <console>:27 []

scala> rdd2.toDebugString
// res3: String = 
// (128) hugefile.txt MapPartitionsRDD[3] at textFile at <console>:27 []
//   |   hugefile.txt HadoopRDD[2] at textFile at <console>:27 []