apache/spark — pull request #1555 by mateiz (2014-07-24 00:06:56+00:00)
Title: SPARK-2657 Use more compact data structures than ArrayBuffer in groupBy & cogroup

JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-2657

Our current code uses ArrayBuffers for each group of values in groupBy, as well as for the key's elements in CoGroupedRDD. ArrayBuffers have a lot of overhead if there are few values in them, which is likely to happen in cases such as join. In particular, they have a pointer to an Object[] of size 16 by default, which is 24 bytes for the array header + 128 for the pointers in there, plus at least 32 for the ArrayBuffer data structure. This patch replaces the per-group buffers with a CompactBuffer class that can store up to 2 elements more efficiently (in fields of itself) and acts like an ArrayBuffer beyond that. For a key's elements in CoGroupedRDD, we use an Array of CompactBuffers instead of an ArrayBuffer of ArrayBuffers.

There are some changes throughout the code to deal with CoGroupedRDD returning Array instead. We can also decide not to do that but CoGroupedRDD is a `@DeveloperAPI` so I think it's okay to change it here.