Spark - repartition() vs coalesce()

It avoids a full shuffle. If it's known that the number is decreasing then the executor can safely keep data on the minimum number of partitions, only moving the data off the extra nodes, onto the nodes that we kept.

So, it would go something like this:

Node 1 = 1,2,3
Node 2 = 4,5,6
Node 3 = 7,8,9
Node 4 = 10,11,12

Then coalesce down to 2 partitions:

Node 1 = 1,2,3 + (10,11,12)
Node 3 = 7,8,9 + (4,5,6)

Notice that Node 1 and Node 3 did not require its original data to move.

Justin's answer is awesome and this response goes into more depth.

The repartition algorithm does a full shuffle and creates new partitions with data that's distributed evenly. Let's create a DataFrame with the numbers from 1 to 12.

val x = (1 to 12).toList
val numbersDf = x.toDF("number")

numbersDf contains 4 partitions on my machine.

numbersDf.rdd.partitions.size // => 4

Here is how the data is divided on the partitions:

Partition 00000: 1, 2, 3
Partition 00001: 4, 5, 6
Partition 00002: 7, 8, 9
Partition 00003: 10, 11, 12

Let's do a full-shuffle with the repartition method and get this data on two nodes.

val numbersDfR = numbersDf.repartition(2)

Here is how the numbersDfR data is partitioned on my machine:

Partition A: 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12
Partition B: 2, 5, 8, 11

The repartition method makes new partitions and evenly distributes the data in the new partitions (the data distribution is more even for larger data sets).

Difference between coalesce and repartition

coalesce uses existing partitions to minimize the amount of data that's shuffled. repartition creates new partitions and does a full shuffle. coalesce results in partitions with different amounts of data (sometimes partitions that have much different sizes) and repartition results in roughly equal sized partitions.

Is coalesce or repartition faster?

coalesce may run faster than repartition, but unequal sized partitions are generally slower to work with than equal sized partitions. You'll usually need to repartition datasets after filtering a large data set. I've found repartition to be faster overall because Spark is built to work with equal sized partitions.

N.B. I've curiously observed that repartition can increase the size of data on disk. Make sure to run tests when you're using repartition / coalesce on large datasets.

Read this blog post if you'd like even more details.

When you'll use coalesce & repartition in practice

• See this question on how to use coalesce & repartition to write out a DataFrame to a single file
• It's critical to repartition after running filtering queries. The number of partitions does not change after filtering, so if you don't repartition, you'll have way too many memory partitions (the more the filter reduces the dataset size, the bigger the problem). Watch out for the empty partition problem.
• partitionBy is used to write out data in partitions on disk. You'll need to use repartition / coalesce to partition your data in memory properly before using partitionBy.