apache/spark — pull request #1799 by mateiz (2014-08-06 03:28:28+00:00)
Title: SPARK-2787: Make sort-based shuffle write files directly when there's no sorting/aggregation and # partitions is small

As described in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-2787, right now sort-based shuffle is more expensive than hash-based for map operations that do no partial aggregation or sorting, such as groupByKey. This is because it has to serialize each data item twice (once when spilling to intermediate files, and then again when merging these files object-by-object). This patch adds a code path to just write separate files directly if the # of output partitions is small, and concatenate them at the end to produce a sorted file.

On the unit test side, I added some tests that force or don't force this bypass path to be used, and checked that our tests for other features (e.g. all the operations) cover both cases.