Can I use setWorkerCacheMb in Apache Beam 2.0+? - google-cloud-dataflow

Question

My Dataflow job (using Java SDK 2.1.0) is quite slow and it is going to take more than a day to process just 50GB. I just pull a whole table from BigQuery (50GB), join with one csv file from GCS (100+MB).
https://cloud.google.com/dataflow/model/group-by-key
I use sideInputs to perform join (the latter way in the documentation above) while I think using CoGroupByKey is more efficient, however I'm not sure that is the only reason my job is super slow.
I googled and it looks by default, a cache of sideinputs set as 100MB and I assume my one is slightly over that limit then each worker continuously re-reads sideinputs. To improve it, I thought I can use setWorkerCacheMb method to increase the cache size.
However it looks DataflowPipelineOptions does not have this method and DataflowWorkerHarnessOptions is hidden. Just passing --workerCacheMb=200 in -Dexec.args results in
An exception occured while executing the Java class.
null: InvocationTargetException:
Class interface com.xxx.yyy.zzz$MyOptions missing a property
named 'workerCacheMb'. -> [Help 1]
How can I use this option? Thanks.
My pipeline:
MyOptions options = PipelineOptionsFactory.fromArgs(args).withValidation().as(MyOptions.class);
Pipeline p = Pipeline.create(options);
PCollection<TableRow> rows = p.apply("Read from BigQuery",
BigQueryIO.read().from("project:MYDATA.events"));
// Read account file
PCollection<String> accounts = p.apply("Read from account file",
TextIO.read().from("gs://my-bucket/accounts.csv")
.withCompressionType(CompressionType.GZIP));
PCollection<TableRow> accountRows = accounts.apply("Convert to TableRow",
ParDo.of(new DoFn<String, TableRow>() {
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
#ProcessElement
public void processElement(ProcessContext c) throws Exception {
String line = c.element();
CSVParser csvParser = new CSVParser();
String[] fields = csvParser.parseLine(line);
TableRow row = new TableRow();
row = row.set("account_id", fields[0]).set("account_uid", fields[1]);
c.output(row);
}
}));
PCollection<KV<String, TableRow>> kvAccounts = accountRows.apply("Populate account_uid:accounts KV",
ParDo.of(new DoFn<TableRow, KV<String, TableRow>>() {
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
#ProcessElement
public void processElement(ProcessContext c) throws Exception {
TableRow row = c.element();
String uid = (String) row.get("account_uid");
c.output(KV.of(uid, row));
}
}));
final PCollectionView<Map<String, TableRow>> uidAccountView = kvAccounts.apply(View.<String, TableRow>asMap());
// Add account_id from account_uid to event data
PCollection<TableRow> rowsWithAccountID = rows.apply("Join account_id",
ParDo.of(new DoFn<TableRow, TableRow>() {
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
#ProcessElement
public void processElement(ProcessContext c) throws Exception {
TableRow row = c.element();
if (row.containsKey("account_uid") && row.get("account_uid") != null) {
String uid = (String) row.get("account_uid");
TableRow accRow = (TableRow) c.sideInput(uidAccountView).get(uid);
if (accRow == null) {
LOG.warn("accRow null, {}", row.toPrettyString());
} else {
row = row.set("account_id", accRow.get("account_id"));
}
}
c.output(row);
}
}).withSideInputs(uidAccountView));
// Insert into BigQuery
WriteResult result = rowsWithAccountID.apply(BigQueryIO.writeTableRows()
.to(new TableRefPartition(StaticValueProvider.of("MYDATA"), StaticValueProvider.of("dev"),
StaticValueProvider.of("deadletter_bucket")))
.withFormatFunction(new SerializableFunction<TableRow, TableRow>() {
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
#Override
public TableRow apply(TableRow row) {
return row;
}
}).withCreateDisposition(CreateDisposition.CREATE_NEVER)
.withWriteDisposition(WriteDisposition.WRITE_APPEND));
p.run();
Historically my system have two identifiers of users, new one (account_id) and old one(account_uid). Now I need to add new account_id to our event data stored in BigQuery retroactively, because old data only has old account_uid. Accounts table (which has relation between account_uid and account_id) is already converted as csv and stored in GCS.
The last func TableRefPartition just store data into BQ's corresponding partition depending on each event timestamp. The job is still running (2017-10-30_22_45_59-18169851018279768913) and bottleneck looks Join account_id part.
That part of throughput (xxx elements/s) goes up and down according to the graph. According to the graph, estimated size of sideInputs is 106MB.
If switching to CoGroupByKey improves performance dramatically, I will do so. I was just lazy and thought using sideInputs is easier to handle event data which doesn't have account info as well.

Answer 1

Try one of:
1) setting the option using some code:
options.as(DataflowWorkerHarnessOptions.class).setWorkerCacheMb(500);
2) having your application register DataflowWorkerHarnessOptions with the PipelineOptionsFactory
3) Having your own options class extend DataflowWorkerHarnessOptions

Answer 2

There's a few things you can do to improve the performance of your code:
Your side input is a Map<String, TableRow>, but you're using only a single field in the TableRow - accRow.get("account_id"). How about making it a Map<String, String> instead, having the value be the account_id itself? That'll likely be quite a bit more efficient than the bulky TableRow object.
You could extract the value of the side input into a lazily initialized member variable in your DoFn, to avoid repeated invocations of .sideInput().
That said, this performance is unexpected and we are investigating whether there's something else going on.