apache/incubator-spark — pull request #409 by tdas (2014-01-13 23:11:59+00:00)
Title: Automatically unpersisting RDDs that have been cleaned up from DStreams

Earlier RDDs generated by DStreams were forgotten but not unpersisted. The system relied on the natural BlockManager LRU to drop the data. The cleaner.ttl was a hammer to clean up RDDs but it is something that needs to be set separately and need to be set very conservatively (at best, few minutes). This automatic unpersisting allows the system to handle this automatically, which reduces memory usage. As a side effect it will also improve GC performance as there are less number of objects stored in memory. In fact, for some workloads, it may allow RDDs to be cached as deserialized, which speeds up processing without too much GC overheads.

This is disabled by default. To enable it set configuration spark.streaming.unpersist to true. In future release, this will be set to true by default.