Optimizing S3A read performance for different file types

The S3A filesystem client supports the notion of input policies, similar to that of the POSIX fadvise() API call. This tunes the behavior of the S3A client to optimize HTTP GET requests for reading different filetypes. To optimize HTTP GET requests, you can take advantage of the S3A input policy option fs.s3a.experimental.input.fadvise.


Policy	Description
"normal"	This starts off as "sequential": it asks for the whole file. As soon as the application tries to seek backwards in the file it switches into "random" IO mode. This is not quite as efficient for Random IO as the "random" mode, because that first read may have to be aborted. However, because it is adaptive, it is the best choice if you do not know the data formats which will be read.
"sequential" (default)	Read through the file, possibly with some short forward seeks. The whole document is requested in a single HTTP request; forward seeks within the readahead range are supported by skipping over the intermediate data. This leads to maximum read throughput, but with very expensive backward seeks.
"random"	Optimized for random IO, specifically the Hadoop `PositionedReadable` operations — though `seek(offset); read(byte_buffer)` also benefits. Rather than ask for the whole file, the range of the HTTP request is set to that of the length of data desired in the `read` operation - rounded up to the readahead value set in `setReadahead()` if necessary. By reducing the cost of closing existing HTTP requests, this is highly efficient for file IO accessing a binary file through a series of `PositionedReadable.read()` and `PositionedReadable.readFully()` calls. Sequential reading of a file is expensive, as now many HTTP requests must be made to read through the file.

For operations simply reading through a file (copying, DistCp, reading gzip or other compressed formats, parsing .csv files, and so on) the sequential policy is appropriate. This is the default, so you do not need to configure it.

For the specific case of high-performance random access IO (for example, accessing ORC files), you may consider using the random policy in the following circumstances:

Data is read using the PositionedReadable API.
There are long distance (many MB) forward seeks.
Backward seeks are as likely as forward seeks.
There is little or no use of single character read() calls or small read(buffer) calls.
Applications are running close to the Amazon S3 data store; that is, the EC2 VMs on which the applications run are in the same region as the Amazon S3 bucket.

You must set the desired fadvise policy in the configuration option fs.s3a.experimental.input.fadvise when the filesystem instance is created. It can only be set on a per-filesystem basis, not on a per-file-read basis. You can set it in core-site.xml:

<property>
  <name>fs.s3a.experimental.input.fadvise</name>
  <value>random</value>
</property>

Or, you can set it in the spark-defaults.conf configuration of Spark:

spark.hadoop.fs.s3a.experimental.input.fadvise random

Be aware that this random access performance comes at the expense of sequential IO — which includes reading files compressed with gzip.