Detecting cache-related bugs in Spark applications

Apache Spark has been widely used to build big data applications. Spark utilizes the abstraction of Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) to store and retrieve large-scale data. To reduce duplicate computation of an RDD, Spark can cache the RDD in memory and then reuse it later, thus improving performance. Spark relies on application developers to enforce caching decisions by using persist() and unpersist() APIs, e.g., which RDD is persisted and when the RDD is persisted / unpersisted. Incorrect RDD caching decisions can cause duplicate computations, or waste precious memory resource, thus introducing serious performance degradation in Spark applications. In this paper, we propose CacheCheck, to automatically detect cache-related bugs in Spark applications. We summarize six cache-related bug patterns in Spark applications, and then dynamically detect cache-related bugs by analyzing the execution traces of Spark applications. We evaluate CacheCheck on six real-world Spark applications. The experimental result shows that CacheCheck detects 72 previously unknown cache-related bugs, and 28 of them have been fixed by developers.