apache/spark — pull request #3857 by JoshRosen (2014-12-31 09:23:08+00:00)
Title: [SPARK-5035] [Streaming] ReceiverMessage trait should extend Serializable

Spark Streaming's ReceiverMessage trait should extend Serializable in order to fix a subtle bug that only occurs when running on a real cluster:

If you attempt to send a fire-and-forget message to a remote Akka actor and that message cannot be serialized, then this seems to lead to more-or-less silent failures. As an optimization, Akka skips message serialization for messages sent within the same JVM. As a result, Spark's unit tests will never fail due to non-serializable Akka messages, but these will cause mostly-silent failures when running on a real cluster.

Before this patch, here was the code for ReceiverMessage:

```
/** Messages sent to the NetworkReceiver. */
private[streaming] sealed trait ReceiverMessage
private[streaming] object StopReceiver extends ReceiverMessage
```

Since ReceiverMessage does not extend Serializable and StopReceiver is a regular `object`, not a `case object`, StopReceiver will throw serialization errors. As a result, graceful receiver shutdown is broken on real clusters but works in local and local-cluster modes. If you want to reproduce this, try running the word count example from the Streaming Programming Guide in the Spark shell:

```
import org.apache.spark._
import org.apache.spark.streaming._
import org.apache.spark.streaming.StreamingContext._
val ssc = new StreamingContext(sc, Seconds(10))
// Create a DStream that will connect to hostname:port, like localhost:9999
val lines = ssc.socketTextStream("localhost", 9999)
// Split each line into words
val words = lines.flatMap(_.split(" "))
import org.apache.spark.streaming.StreamingContext._
// Count each word in each batch
val pairs = words.map(word => (word, 1))
val wordCounts = pairs.reduceByKey(_ + _)
// Print the first ten elements of each RDD generated in this DStream to the console
wordCounts.print()
ssc.start()
Thread.sleep(10000)
ssc.stop(true, true)
```

Prior to this patch, this would work correctly in local mode but fail when running against a real cluster.