The sc.StorageLevel -> StorageLevel pathway is a bit janky, but otherwise
the shell would have to call a private method of SparkContext. Having
StorageLevel available in sc also doesn't seem like the end of the world.
There may be a better solution, though.
As for creating the StorageLevel object itself, this seems to be the best
way in Python 2 for creating singleton, enum-like objects:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36932/how-can-i-represent-an-enum-in-python
One unfortunate consequence of this fix is that we materialize any
collections that are given to us as generators, but this seems necessary
to get reasonable behavior on small collections. We could add a
batchSize parameter later to bypass auto-computation of batch size if
this becomes a problem (e.g. if users really want to parallelize big
generators nicely)
The problem was that the gateway was being initialized whenever the
pyspark.context module was loaded. The fix uses lazy initialization
that occurs only when SparkContext instances are actually constructed.
I also made the gateway and jvm variables private.
This change results in ~3-4x performance improvement when running the
PySpark unit tests.
