Efficient Count Distinct with Apache Spark

visitors.distinct().count() would be the obvious ways, with the first way in distinct you can specify the level of parallelism and also see improvement in the speed. If it is possible to set up visitors as a stream and use D-streams, that would do the count in realtime. You can stream directly from a directory and use the same methods as on the RDD like:

val file = ssc.textFileStream("...") file.distinct().count()

Last option is to use def countApproxDistinct(relativeSD: Double = 0.05): Long however this is labelled as experimental, but would be significantly faster than count if relativeSD (std deviation) is higher.

EDIT: Since you want the count per website you can just reduce on the website id, this can be done efficiently (with combiners ) since count is aggregate. If you have an RDD of website name user id tuples you can do. visitors.countDistinctByKey() or visitors.countApproxDistinctByKey(), once again the approx one is experimental. To use approx distinct by key you need a PairRDD

Interesting side note if you are ok with approximations and want fast results you might want to look into blinkDB made by the same people as spark amp labs.

I've had to do similar things, one efficiency thing you can do (that isn't really spark) is map your vistor IDs to lists of bytes rather than GUID Strings, you can save 4x space then (as 2 Chars is hex encoding of a single byte, and a Char uses 2 bytes in a String).

// Inventing these custom types purely for this question - don't do this in real life!
type VistorID = List[Byte]
type WebsiteID = Int

val visitors: RDD[(WebsiteID, VisitorID)] = ???

visitors.distinct().mapValues(_ => 1).reduceByKey(_ + _)

Note you could also do:

visitors.distinct().map(_._1).countByValue()

but this doesn't scale as well.