How to handle small file problem in spark structured streaming?

This is a common burning question of spark streaming with no any fixed answer. I took an unconventional approach which is based on idea of append. As you are using spark 2.4.1, this solution will be helpful.

So, if append were supported in columnar file format like parquet or orc, it would have been just easier as the new data could be appended in same file and file size can get on bigger and bigger after every micro-batch. However, as it is not supported, I took versioning approach to achieve this. After every micro-batch, the data is produced with a version partition. e.g.

/prod/mobility/cdr_data/date=01–01–2010/version=12345/file1.parquet
/prod/mobility/cdr_data/date=01–01–2010/version=23456/file1.parquet

What we can do is that, in every micro-batch, read the old version data, union it with the new streaming data and write it again at the same path with new version. Then, delete old versions. In this way after every micro-batch, there will be a single version and single file in every partition. The size of files in each partition will keep on growing and get bigger.

As union of streaming dataset and static dataset isn't allowed, we can use forEachBatch sink (available in spark >=2.4.0) to convert streaming dataset to static dataset.

I have described how to achieve this optimally in the link. You might want to have a look. https://medium.com/@kumar.rahul.nitk/solving-small-file-problem-in-spark-structured-streaming-a-versioning-approach-73a0153a0a

We had a similar problem, too. After a lot of Googling, it seemed the generally accepted way was to write another job that every so often aggregates the many small files and writes them elsewhere in larger, consolidated files. This is what we now do.

As an aside: there is a limit to what you can do here anyway as the more parallelism you have, the greater the number of files because each executor thread writes to its own file. They never write to a shared file. This appears to be the nature of the beast that is parallel processing.

I know this question is too old. I had similar problem & I have used spark structured streaming query listeners to solve this problem.

My use case is fetching data from kafka & storing in hdfs with year, month, day & hour partitions.

Below code will take previous hour partition data, apply repartitioning & overwrite data in existing partition.

val session = SparkSession.builder().master("local[2]").enableHiveSupport().getOrCreate()
session.streams.addListener(AppListener(config,session))

class AppListener(config: Config,spark: SparkSession) extends StreamingQueryListener {
  override def onQueryStarted(event: StreamingQueryListener.QueryStartedEvent): Unit = {}
  override def onQueryProgress(event: StreamingQueryListener.QueryProgressEvent): Unit = {
    this.synchronized {AppListener.mergeFiles(event.progress.timestamp,spark,config)}
  }
  override def onQueryTerminated(event: StreamingQueryListener.QueryTerminatedEvent): Unit = {}
}

object AppListener {

  def mergeFiles(currentTs: String,spark: SparkSession,config:Config):Unit = {
    val configs = config.kafka(config.key.get)
    if(currentTs.datetime.isAfter(Processed.ts.plusMinutes(5))) {

      println(
        s"""
           |Current Timestamp     :     ${currentTs}
           |Merge Files           :     ${Processed.ts.minusHours(1)}
           |
           |""".stripMargin)

      val fs = FileSystem.get(spark.sparkContext.hadoopConfiguration)
      val ts = Processed.ts.minusHours(1)
      val hdfsPath = s"${configs.hdfsLocation}/year=${ts.getYear}/month=${ts.getMonthOfYear}/day=${ts.getDayOfMonth}/hour=${ts.getHourOfDay}"
      val path = new Path(hdfsPath)

      if(fs.exists(path)) {

      val hdfsFiles = fs.listLocatedStatus(path)
        .filter(lfs => lfs.isFile && !lfs.getPath.getName.contains("_SUCCESS"))
        .map(_.getPath).toList

      println(
        s"""
           |Total files in HDFS location  : ${hdfsFiles.length}
           | ${hdfsFiles.length > 1}
           |""".stripMargin)

      if(hdfsFiles.length > 1) {

          println(
            s"""
               |Merge Small Files
               |==============================================
               |HDFS Path             : ${hdfsPath}
               |Total Available files : ${hdfsFiles.length}
               |Status                : Running
               |
               |""".stripMargin)

          val df = spark.read.format(configs.writeFormat).load(hdfsPath).cache()
          df.repartition(1)
            .write
            .format(configs.writeFormat)
            .mode("overwrite")
            .save(s"/tmp${hdfsPath}")

          df.cache().unpersist()

        spark
          .read
          .format(configs.writeFormat)
          .load(s"/tmp${hdfsPath}")
          .write
          .format(configs.writeFormat)
          .mode("overwrite")
          .save(hdfsPath)

          Processed.ts = Processed.ts.plusHours(1).toDateTime("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:00:00")
          println(
            s"""
               |Merge Small Files
               |==============================================
               |HDFS Path             : ${hdfsPath}
               |Total files           : ${hdfsFiles.length}
               |Status                : Completed
               |
               |""".stripMargin)
        }
      }
    }
  }
  def apply(config: Config,spark: SparkSession): AppListener = new AppListener(config,spark)
}

object Processed {
  var ts: DateTime = DateTime.now(DateTimeZone.forID("UTC")).toDateTime("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:00:00")
}

Sometime data is huge & I have divided data into multiple files using below logic. File size will be around ~160 MB

val bytes = spark.sessionState.executePlan(df.queryExecution.logical).optimizedPlan.stats(spark.sessionState.conf).sizeInBytes
    val dataSize = bytes.toLong
    val numPartitions = (bytes.toLong./(1024.0)./(1024.0)./(10240)).ceil.toInt

    df.repartition(if(numPartitions == 0) 1 else numPartitions)
      .[...]

Edit-1

Using this - spark.sessionState.executePlan(df.queryExecution.logical).optimizedPlan.stats(spark.sessionState.conf).sizeInBytes we can get the size of actual Dataframe once its loaded into memory, for example you can check below code.

scala> val df = spark.read.format("orc").load("/tmp/srinivas/")
df: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [channelGrouping: string, clientId: string ... 75 more fields]

scala> import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils
import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils

scala> val bytes = spark.sessionState.executePlan(df.queryExecution.logical).optimizedPlan.stats(spark.sessionState.conf).sizeInBytes
bytes: BigInt = 763275709

scala> FileUtils.byteCountToDisplaySize(bytes.toLong)
res5: String = 727 MB

scala> import sys.process._
import sys.process._

scala> "hdfs dfs -ls -h /tmp/srinivas/".!
Found 2 items
-rw-r-----   3 svcmxns hdfs          0 2020-04-20 01:46 /tmp/srinivas/_SUCCESS
-rw-r-----   3 svcmxns hdfs    727.4 M 2020-04-20 01:46 /tmp/srinivas/part-00000-9d0b72ea-f617-4092-ae27-d36400c17917-c000.snappy.orc
res6: Int = 0