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theresawelchy · 6 years

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Make Python Pandas go fast

Some Background

Suppose you have a Data Analysis batch job that runs every hour on a dedicated machine. As the weeks go by, you notice that the inputs are getting larger and the time taken to run it gets longer, slowly nearing the one hour mark. You worry that subsequent executions might begin to ‘run into’ each other and cause your business pipelines to misbehave. Or perhaps you’re under SLA to deliver results for a batch of information within a given time constraint, and with the batch size slowly increasing in production, you’re approaching the maximum allotted time.

This sounds like you might have a streaming problem! But – you say – other parts of the analytics pipeline are owned by other teams, and getting everyone on board with migrating to a streaming architecture will take time and a lot of effort. By the time that happens, your particular piece of the pipeline might get completely clogged up. Wallaroo, while originally desinged for streaming and event data, can also be used to reliably parallelize many workloads not normally thought of as streaming, with little effort.

Let’s make our pandas go faster! We’ll use an ad-hoc cluster to parallelize a batch job and reduce its run-time by ¾ on one machine. The cluster will consist of several Wallaroo workers on one machine, and can be shut down after the job is done.

With this structure in place, we can easily scale out horizontally onto multiple machines, if needed. This means that we can roll out a little piece of streaming architecture in our own backyard, and have a story ready when the time comes to move other parts of the stack into the evented streaming world.

The Existing Pipeline

# file: old_pipeline.py df = pd.read_csv(infile, index_col=0, dtype=unicode, engine='python') fancy_ml_black_box.classify_df(df) df.to_csv(outfile, header=False)

The bottleneck lies in fancy_ml_black_box.classify_df. This function runs a classifier, written by our Data Analysts, on each row of the pandas dataframe. Since the results of classifying a particular row are independent of classifying any other row, it seems like a good candidate for parallelization.

A note on the fancy black box classifier

If you look inside the classifier source code, you’ll find that it calls dataframe.apply with a rather meaningless computation. We’ve chosen something that burns CPU cycles in order to simulate an expensive machine learning classification process and showcase the gains to be had from parallelizing it.

Here’s how we can do it with Wallaroo:

ab = wallaroo.ApplicationBuilder("Parallel Pandas Classifier with Wallaroo") ab.new_pipeline("Classifier", wallaroo.TCPSourceConfig(in_host, in_port, decode)) ab.to_stateful(batch_rows, RowBuffer, "CSV rows + global header state") ab.to_parallel(classify) ab.to_sink(wallaroo.TCPSinkConfig(out_host, out_port, encode))

The idea is to ingest the csv rows using our TCP source, batch them up into small dataframes, and run the classification algorithm in parallel.

We’ll preserve the input and output formats of our section of the pipeline, maintaining compatibility with upstream and downstream systems, but hopefully see significant speed increases by leveraging all the cores on our server.

Baseline Measurements

Let’s get some baseline measurements for our application. Here are the run-times for input files of varying sizes:

input size time taken (AWS c5.4xlarge) 1000 rows 3.7s 10,000 rows 35s 100,000 rows 5m 53s 1,000,000 rows 58m 21s

These numbers make it clear that we’re dealing with an algorithm of linear run-time complexity – the time taken to perform the task is linearly dependent on the size of the input. We can estimate that our pipeline will be in trouble if the rate of data coming in exceeds ~270 rows/second, on average.

This means that if the hourly job inputs start to approach 1 million rows, new jobs may start ‘running into’ old jobs that haven’t yet finished.

Parallelizing Pandas with Wallaroo

Let’s see if we can improve these numbers a bit, by splitting all the work among the available CPU cores (8 of them) on this machine. First, we’ll need some scaffolding to set up input and output for Wallaroo.

Step 1: Sending the CSV file to Wallaroo

We’ll use a Python script to read all the lines in our input csv file and send them to our Wallaroo TCP Source. We’ll need to frame each line so that they can be decoded properly in the Wallaroo source:

try: with open(filename, 'rb') as f: for line in f.readlines(): line = line.strip() sock.sendall(struct.pack(">I",len(line))+line) finally: sock.sendall(struct.pack(">I",len(EOT))+EOT) print('Done sending {}'.format(filename)) sock.close()

sock.sendall(struct.pack(">I",len(line))+line) means: encode the length of the line as a 4-byte, big-endian integer (I), then send both that integer, and the full line of text, down the TCP socket.

In the finally clause, we also encode and send down a single ASCII EOT byte, to signal that this is the end our our input.

This TCP input is received by our decoder:

@wallaroo.decoder(header_length=4, length_fmt=">I") def decode(bs): if bs == "\x04": return EndOfInput() else: return bs

As you can see, if our data is the EOT byte (\x04), we’ll create an object that makes the “End Of Input” meaning explicit. Otherwise, we’ll take the data as-is.

Step 2: Batching the CSV Rows

The next step in the pipeline is where we batch input rows into chunks of 100.

@wallaroo.state_computation(name='Batch rows of csv, emit DataFrames') def batch_rows(row, row_buffer): return (row_buffer.update_with(row), True)

The RowBuffer state object will take the first row it sees and save that internally as a header. Then it will accept incoming rows until it stores a certain amount (100 rows in our app). The .update_with(row) method will return None if the row was added but there’s still room in the buffer. If the update fills the buffer, it will zero out internally and emit a BatchedRows object with 2 fields: a header and rows. This object will get passed down to the next computation, while the RowBuffer will start collecting another batch.

A note on serialization efficiency

Why go through the exercise of batching, when we can simply send each entry in the CSV file as a single-row dataframe to our classifier? The answer is: for speed. Every transfer of data between computation steps in Wallaroo can potentially entail coding and decoding the data on the wire, and the creation of dataframe objects is not without its own cost.

Step 3: Classifying mini-dataframes in parallel

This is the part of the pipeline where we can bring Wallaroo’s built-in distribution mechanism down to bear on our problem:

@wallaroo.computation(name="Classify") def classify(batched_rows): df = build_dataframe(batched_rows) fancy_ml_black_box.classify_df(df) return df

There is some massaging involved in getting a BatchedRows object converted into a dataframe:

def build_dataframe(br): buf = StringIO(br.header + "\n" + ("\n".join(br.rows))) return pd.read_csv(buf, index_col=0, dtype=unicode, engine='python')

Essentially, we glue the BatchedRows.header to the BatchedRows.rows to simulate a stand-alone csv file, which we then pass to pandas.read_csv in the form of a StringIO buffer. We can now pass the resulting enriched dataframe to the fancy_ml_black_box.classify_df() function.

All of the above work, including marshalling the data into a dataframe, happens in parallel, with every Wallaroo worker in the cluster getting a different instance of BufferedRows.

Step 4: Encoding back to a file

The dataframe output by classify(), above, gets serialized and framed by the encode step. By now you should be somewhat familiar with the simple TCP framing used throughout this project:

def encode(df): s = dataframe_to_csv(df) return struct.pack('>I',len(s)) + s

With the helper function dataframe_to_csv defined as:

def dataframe_to_csv(df): buf = StringIO() df.to_csv(buf, header=False) s = buf.getvalue().strip() buf.close() return s

This representation is read by the Wallaroo tool data_receiver, which is told to listen for --framed data:

nohup data_receiver \ --framed --listen "$LEADER":"$SINK_PORT" \ --ponynopin \ > "$OUTPUT" 2>&1 &

Which is great, because that’s what it’s going to get. The output will be written to a file, specified by the environment variable OUTPUT.

The Effects on Run-Time

First, let’s verify that the new code produces the same output as the old code:

$ /usr/bin/time make run-old INPUT=input/1000.csv ./old_pipeline.py input/1000.csv "output/old_1000.csv" 3.85user 0.47system 0:03.70elapsed 116%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 54260maxresident)k 176inputs+288outputs (0major+17423minor)pagefaults 0swaps $ /usr/bin/time make run-new N_WORKERS=1 INPUT=input/1000.csv INPUT=input/1000.csv OUTPUT="output/new_1000.csv" N_WORKERS=1 ./run_machida.sh (..) 4.48user 0.90system 0:04.13elapsed 130%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 63808maxresident)k 0inputs+352outputs (0major+989180minor)pagefaults 0swaps $ diff output/new_1000.csv output/old_1000.csv $ echo $? 0

Yay! The results match, and the run-time is only 1 second slower, which is not that bad, considering we’re launching 3 separate processes (sender, wallaroo, and receiver) and sending all the data over the network twice.

Now, let’s see the gains to be had on bigger inputs. First, the 10,000-line file:

original code 1 worker 4 workers 8 workers 35s 39s 20s 11s

Now, with the 100,000-line file:

original code 1 worker 4 workers 8 workers 5m48s 6m28s 3m16s 1m41s

And with the million-line file:

original code 1 worker 4 workers 8 workers 58m21s 1h03m46s 32m12s 16m33s

Why didn’t you test on 2 workers?

Due to the single-threaded constraints of Python’s execution model, the initializer in a wallaroo cluster will often aggressively undertake its share of a parallel workload before sending out work to the rest of the cluster.

This means that running a parallel job on 2 workers will not yield speed benefits. We recommend running clusters of at least 4 workers in order to leverage Wallaroo’s scaling capabilities.

As you can see above (and verify for yourself by cloning this example project), we were able to cut the million-line processing time down to sixteen minutes. Moreover, if the input datasets become too large for our single-machine, eight-worker cluster, we can very easily add more machines and leverage the extra parallelism, without changing a single line of code in our Wallaroo application.

This gives us considerable capacity to weather the storm of increasing load, while we design a more mature streaming architecture for the system as a whole.

What’s Next?

Hopefully I’ve made the case above that Wallaroo can be used as an ad-hoc method for adapting your existing pandas-based analytics pipelines to handle increased load. Next time, I’ll show you how to spin up Wallaroo clusters on-demand, to handle those truly enormous jobs that will not fit on one machine.

Putting your analytics pipelines in a streaming framework opens up not only possibilities for scaling your data science, but also for real-time insights. Once you’re ready to take the plunge into a true evented model, all you have to do is send your data directly to Wallaroo, bypassing the CSV stage completely. The actual Wallaroo pipeline doesn’t need to change! With a little up-front investment, you’ve unlocked a broad range of possibilities to productionize your Python analytics code.

If you’d like to find out more how Wallaroo can help out with scaling Python analytics, please reach out to [email protected]. We’re always happy to chat!

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