java.lang.StackOverFlowError when converting an RDD to a DataFrame

Question

Trying to compute tf-idf scores for a large RDD of documents, and it always crashes whenever I try to convert it to a dataframe. The initial error I get is

org.apache.spark.SparkException: Job aborted due to stage failure: Task serialization failed: java.lang.StackOverflowError

Followed by this, repeated many many times:

        at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeSerialData(ObjectOutputStream.java:1509)
        at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeOrdinaryObject(ObjectOutputStream.java:1432)
        at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.writeObject0(ObjectOutputStream.java:1178)
        at java.io.ObjectOutputStream.defaultWriteFields(ObjectOutputStream.java:1548)

Followed by

at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler.org$apache$spark$scheduler$DAGScheduler$$failJobAndIndependentStages(DAGScheduler.scala:1889)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler$$anonfun$abortStage$1.apply(DAGScheduler.scala:1877)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler$$anonfun$abortStage$1.apply(DAGScheduler.scala:1876)
        at scala.collection.mutable.ResizableArray$class.foreach(ResizableArray.scala:59)
        at scala.collection.mutable.ArrayBuffer.foreach(ArrayBuffer.scala:48)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler.abortStage(DAGScheduler.scala:1876)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler.submitMissingTasks(DAGScheduler.scala:1171)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler.org$apache$spark$scheduler$DAGScheduler$$submitStage(DAGScheduler.scala:1069)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler.handleJobSubmitted(DAGScheduler.scala:1013)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGSchedulerEventProcessLoop.doOnReceive(DAGScheduler.scala:2067)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGSchedulerEventProcessLoop.onReceive(DAGScheduler.scala:2059)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGSchedulerEventProcessLoop.onReceive(DAGScheduler.scala:2048)
        at org.apache.spark.util.EventLoop$$anon$1.run(EventLoop.scala:49)
        at org.apache.spark.scheduler.DAGScheduler.runJob(DAGScheduler.scala:737)
        at org.apache.spark.SparkContext.runJob(SparkContext.scala:2061)
        at org.apache.spark.SparkContext.runJob(SparkContext.scala:2082)
        at org.apache.spark.SparkContext.runJob(SparkContext.scala:2101)
        at org.apache.spark.api.python.PythonRDD$.runJob(PythonRDD.scala:153)
        at org.apache.spark.api.python.PythonRDD.runJob(PythonRDD.scala)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
        at py4j.reflection.MethodInvoker.invoke(MethodInvoker.java:244)
        at py4j.reflection.ReflectionEngine.invoke(ReflectionEngine.java:357)
        at py4j.Gateway.invoke(Gateway.java:282)
        at py4j.commands.AbstractCommand.invokeMethod(AbstractCommand.java:132)
        at py4j.commands.CallCommand.execute(CallCommand.java:79)
        at py4j.GatewayConnection.run(GatewayConnection.java:238)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)

I've done some research and it seems like this DAG (directed acyclic graph) associated with the dataframe is too big, and that I should do some kind of caching/checkpointing/persisting to my data to solve it. Still crashed every time. To avoid obfuscating the problem, I've omitted those caching/checkpointing/persisting lines from the code below:

from pyspark.sql import SQLContext
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

spark = SparkSession.builder.appName('app').getOrCreate()
rdd = spark.sparkContext.parallelize([])
data = []
count = 0
for sentence in giant_list_of_sentences:
   words = sentence.split(' ')
   data.append((words, count)) #Count is the index of the document
   count += 1
   if (len(data) > 5000):
      rdd = rdd.union(spark.sparkContext.parallelize(data))
if (len(data) > 0):
   rdd = rdd.union(spark.sparkContext.parallelize(data))
df_txts = sqlContext.createDataFrame(data, ["list_of_words",'index'])

Always makes it to the last line and then fails, unless made to run on only a small portion of the data in which it works correctly.

Answer 1

So the solution is actually pretty simple - turns out that converting a giant RDD to a giant dataframe is hard, but converting several smaller RDDs to several smaller dataframes, and then joining the dataframes, works pretty well.

from pyspark.sql import SQLContext
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

spark = SparkSession.builder.appName('app').getOrCreate()
rdds = [spark.sparkContext.parallelize([])]*6
data = []
count = 0
turn = 0
for sentence in giant_list_of_sentences:
   words = sentence.split(' ')
   data.append((words, count)) #Count is the index of the document
   count += 1
   if (len(data) > 5000):
      rdds[turn] = rdds[turn].union(spark.sparkContext.parallelize(data))
if (len(data) > 0):
   rdds[turn] = rdds[turn].union(spark.sparkContext.parallelize(data))
df_txts = rdds[0].toDF(['list_of_words', 'index'])
for i in range(1, len(rdds)):
   df_txts = df_txts.union(rdds[i].toDF(['list_of_words', 'index'])
df_txts = sqlContext.createDataFrame(data, ["list_of_words",'index'])