This patch adds error-detection logic to throw an exception when attempting to create multiple active SparkContexts in the same JVM, since this is currently unsupported and has been known to cause confusing behavior (see SPARK-2243 for more details).
**The solution implemented here is only a partial fix.** A complete fix would have the following properties:
1. Only one SparkContext may ever be under construction at any given time.
2. Once a SparkContext has been successfully constructed, any subsequent construction attempts should fail until the active SparkContext is stopped.
3. If the SparkContext constructor throws an exception, then all resources created in the constructor should be cleaned up (SPARK-4194).
4. If a user attempts to create a SparkContext but the creation fails, then the user should be able to create new SparkContexts.
This PR only provides 2) and 4); we should be able to provide all of these properties, but the correct fix will involve larger changes to SparkContext's construction / initialization, so we'll target it for a different Spark release.
### The correct solution:
I think that the correct way to do this would be to move the construction of SparkContext's dependencies into a static method in the SparkContext companion object. Specifically, we could make the default SparkContext constructor `private` and change it to accept a `SparkContextDependencies` object that contains all of SparkContext's dependencies (e.g. DAGScheduler, ContextCleaner, etc.). Secondary constructors could call a method on the SparkContext companion object to create the `SparkContextDependencies` and pass the result to the primary SparkContext constructor. For example:
```scala
class SparkContext private (deps: SparkContextDependencies) {
def this(conf: SparkConf) {
this(SparkContext.getDeps(conf))
}
}
object SparkContext(
private[spark] def getDeps(conf: SparkConf): SparkContextDependencies = synchronized {
if (anotherSparkContextIsActive) { throw Exception(...) }
var dagScheduler: DAGScheduler = null
try {
dagScheduler = new DAGScheduler(...)
[...]
} catch {
case e: Exception =>
Option(dagScheduler).foreach(_.stop())
[...]
}
SparkContextDependencies(dagScheduler, ....)
}
}
```
This gives us mutual exclusion and ensures that any resources created during the failed SparkContext initialization are properly cleaned up.
This indirection is necessary to maintain binary compatibility. In retrospect, it would have been nice if SparkContext had no private constructors and could only be created through builder / factory methods on its companion object, since this buys us lots of flexibility and makes dependency injection easier.
### Alternative solutions:
As an alternative solution, we could refactor SparkContext's primary constructor to perform all object creation in a giant `try-finally` block. Unfortunately, this will require us to turn a bunch of `vals` into `vars` so that they can be assigned from the `try` block. If we still want `vals`, we could wrap each `val` in its own `try` block (since the try block can return a value), but this will lead to extremely messy code and won't guard against the introduction of future code which doesn't properly handle failures.
The more complex approach outlined above gives us some nice dependency injection benefits, so I think that might be preferable to a `var`-ification.
### This PR's solution:
- At the start of the constructor, check whether some other SparkContext is active; if so, throw an exception.
- If another SparkContext might be under construction (or has thrown an exception during construction), allow the new SparkContext to begin construction but log a warning (since resources might have been leaked from a failed creation attempt).
- At the end of the SparkContext constructor, check whether some other SparkContext constructor has raced and successfully created an active context. If so, throw an exception.
This guarantees that no two SparkContexts will ever be active and exposed to users (since we check at the very end of the constructor). If two threads race to construct SparkContexts, then one of them will win and another will throw an exception.
This exception can be turned into a warning by setting `spark.driver.allowMultipleContexts = true`. The exception is disabled in unit tests, since there are some suites (such as Hive) that may require more significant refactoring to clean up their SparkContexts. I've made a few changes to other suites' test fixtures to properly clean up SparkContexts so that the unit test logs contain fewer warnings.
Author: Josh Rosen <joshrosen@databricks.com>
Closes#3121 from JoshRosen/SPARK-4180 and squashes the following commits:
23c7123 [Josh Rosen] Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into SPARK-4180
d38251b [Josh Rosen] Address latest round of feedback.
c0987d3 [Josh Rosen] Accept boolean instead of SparkConf in methods.
85a424a [Josh Rosen] Incorporate more review feedback.
372d0d3 [Josh Rosen] Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into SPARK-4180
f5bb78c [Josh Rosen] Update mvn build, too.
d809cb4 [Josh Rosen] Improve handling of failed SparkContext creation attempts.
79a7e6f [Josh Rosen] Fix commented out test
a1cba65 [Josh Rosen] Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into SPARK-4180
7ba6db8 [Josh Rosen] Add utility to set system properties in tests.
4629d5c [Josh Rosen] Set spark.driver.allowMultipleContexts=true in tests.
ed17e14 [Josh Rosen] Address review feedback; expose hack workaround for existing unit tests.
1c66070 [Josh Rosen] Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into SPARK-4180
06c5c54 [Josh Rosen] Add / improve SparkContext cleanup in streaming BasicOperationsSuite
d0437eb [Josh Rosen] StreamingContext.stop() should stop SparkContext even if StreamingContext has not been started yet.
c4d35a2 [Josh Rosen] Log long form of creation site to aid debugging.
918e878 [Josh Rosen] Document "one SparkContext per JVM" limitation.
afaa7e3 [Josh Rosen] [SPARK-4180] Prevent creations of multiple active SparkContexts.
0f3ceb56c7