Py4JJavaError: An error occurred while calling

Question

I am new to PySpark. I have been writing my code with a test sample. Once I run the code on the larger file(3gb compressed). My code is only doing some filtering and joins. I keep getting errors regarding py4J.

Any help would be useful, and appreciated.

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from pyspark.conf import SparkConf

ss = SparkSession \
      .builder \
      .appName("Example") \
      .getOrCreate()

ss.conf.set("spark.sql.execution.arrow.enabled", 'true')

df = ss.read.csv(directory + '/' + filename, header=True, sep=",")
# Some filtering and groupbys...
df.show()

Return

Py4JJavaError: An error occurred while calling o88.showString.
: org.apache.spark.SparkException: Job aborted due to stage failure: Task 0 in 
stage 3.0 failed 1 times, most recent failure: Lost task 0.0 in stage 3.0 (TID 
1, localhost, executor driver): java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
...
Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

UPDATE: I was using py4j 10.7 and just updated to 10.8

UPDATE(1): Adding spark.driver.memory:

 ss = SparkSession \
  .builder \
  .appName("Example") \
  .config("spark.driver.memory", "16g")\
  .getOrCreate()

Summarized Return Error:

ERROR:py4j.java_gateway:An error occurred while trying to connect to the Java server (127.0.0.1:38004)

py4j.protocol.Py4JNetworkError: Answer from Java side is empty
"Error while receiving", e, proto.ERROR_ON_RECEIVE)
py4j.protocol.Py4JNetworkError: Error while receiving

Py4JError
Py4JError: An error occurred while calling o94.showString

UPDATE(2) : I tried this, by changing the spark-defaults.conf file. Still getting error PySpark: java.lang.OutofMemoryError: Java heap space

SEMI-SOLVED : This seemed to be a general memory problem. I started a 2xlarge instance with 32g of memory. The program runs with no errors.

Knowing this, is there something else, a conf option that could help so I don't have to run an expensive instance?

Thanks Everyone.

Answer 1

This is a current issue with pyspark 2.4.0 installed via conda. You'll want to downgrade to pyspark 2.3.0 via conda prompt or Linux terminal:

    conda install pyspark=2.3.0