Troubleshooting

Many things can go wrong in an EMR job, and the system’s distributed nature can make it difficult to find the source of a problem. mrjob attempts to simplify the debugging process by automatically scanning logs for probable causes of failure.

In addition to looking at S3, mrjob can be configured to also use SSH to fetch error logs directly from the master and worker nodes. This can speed up debugging significantly (EMR only transfers logs to S3 every five minutes).

Using persistent clusters

When troubleshooting a job, it can be convenient to use a persistent cluster to avoid having to wait for bootstrapping every run.

First, use the mrjob create-cluster to create a persistent cluster:

$ mrjob create-cluster
Using configs in /Users/davidmarin/.mrjob.conf
Using s3://mrjob-35cdec11663cb1cb/tmp/ as our temp dir on S3
Creating persistent cluster to run several jobs in...
Creating temp directory /var/folders/zv/jmtt5bxs6xl3kzt38470hcxm0000gn/T/no_script.davidmarin.20160324.231018.720057
Copying local files to s3://mrjob-35cdec11663cb1cb/tmp/no_script.davidmarin.20160324.231018.720057/files/...
j-3BYHP30KB81XE

Now you can use the cluster ID to start the troublesome job:

$ python mrjob/examples/mr_boom.py README.rst -r emr --cluster-id j-3BYHP30KB81XE
Using configs in /Users/davidmarin/.mrjob.conf
Using s3://mrjob-35cdec11663cb1cb/tmp/ as our temp dir on S3
Creating temp directory /var/folders/zv/jmtt5bxs6xl3kzt38470hcxm0000gn/T/mr_boom.davidmarin.20160324.231045.501027
Copying local files to s3://mrjob-35cdec11663cb1cb/tmp/mr_boom.davidmarin.20160324.231045.501027/files/...
Adding our job to existing cluster j-3BYHP30KB81XE
Waiting for step 1 of 1 (s-SGVW9B5LEXF5) to complete...
  PENDING (cluster is STARTING: Provisioning Amazon EC2 capacity)
  PENDING (cluster is STARTING: Provisioning Amazon EC2 capacity)
  PENDING (cluster is STARTING: Provisioning Amazon EC2 capacity)
  PENDING (cluster is STARTING: Provisioning Amazon EC2 capacity)
  PENDING (cluster is STARTING: Provisioning Amazon EC2 capacity)
  PENDING (cluster is BOOTSTRAPPING: Running bootstrap actions)
  PENDING (cluster is BOOTSTRAPPING: Running bootstrap actions)
  PENDING (cluster is BOOTSTRAPPING: Running bootstrap actions)
  PENDING (cluster is BOOTSTRAPPING: Running bootstrap actions)
  PENDING (cluster is BOOTSTRAPPING: Running bootstrap actions)
  Opening ssh tunnel to resource manager...
  Connect to resource manager at: http://localhost:40069/cluster
  RUNNING for 9.2s
  RUNNING for 42.3s
     0.0% complete
  RUNNING for 72.6s
     5.0% complete
  RUNNING for 102.9s
     5.0% complete
  RUNNING for 133.4s
   100.0% complete
  FAILED
Cluster j-3BYHP30KB81XE is WAITING: Cluster ready after last step failed.
Attempting to fetch counters from logs...
Looking for step log in /mnt/var/log/hadoop/steps/s-SGVW9B5LEXF5 on ec2-52-37-112-240.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com...
  Parsing step log: ssh://ec2-52-37-112-240.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/mnt/var/log/hadoop/steps/s-SGVW9B5LEXF5/syslog
Counters: 9
    Job Counters
            Data-local map tasks=1
            Failed map tasks=4
            Launched map tasks=4
            Other local map tasks=3
            Total megabyte-seconds taken by all map tasks=58125312
            Total time spent by all map tasks (ms)=75684
            Total time spent by all maps in occupied slots (ms)=227052
            Total time spent by all reduces in occupied slots (ms)=0
            Total vcore-seconds taken by all map tasks=75684
Scanning logs for probable cause of failure...
Looking for task logs in /mnt/var/log/hadoop/userlogs/application_1458861299388_0001 on ec2-52-37-112-240.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com and task/core nodes...
  Parsing task syslog: ssh://ec2-52-37-112-240.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/mnt/var/log/hadoop/userlogs/application_1458861299388_0001/container_1458861299388_0001_01_000005/syslog
  Parsing task stderr: ssh://ec2-52-37-112-240.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/mnt/var/log/hadoop/userlogs/application_1458861299388_0001/container_1458861299388_0001_01_000005/stderr
Probable cause of failure:

PipeMapRed failed!
java.lang.RuntimeException: PipeMapRed.waitOutputThreads(): subprocess failed with code 1
    at org.apache.hadoop.streaming.PipeMapRed.waitOutputThreads(PipeMapRed.java:330)
    at org.apache.hadoop.streaming.PipeMapRed.mapRedFinished(PipeMapRed.java:543)
    at org.apache.hadoop.streaming.PipeMapper.close(PipeMapper.java:130)
    at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapRunner.run(MapRunner.java:81)
    at org.apache.hadoop.streaming.PipeMapRunner.run(PipeMapRunner.java:34)
    at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask.runOldMapper(MapTask.java:432)
    at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.MapTask.run(MapTask.java:343)
    at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.YarnChild$2.run(YarnChild.java:175)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at javax.security.auth.Subject.doAs(Subject.java:415)
    at org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.doAs(UserGroupInformation.java:1548)
    at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.YarnChild.main(YarnChild.java:170)

(from lines 37-50 of ssh://ec2-52-37-112-240.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/mnt/var/log/hadoop/userlogs/application_1458861299388_0001/container_1458861299388_0001_01_000005/syslog)

caused by:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mr_boom.py", line 10, in <module>
    MRBoom.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/mrjob/job.py", line 430, in run
    mr_job.execute()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/mrjob/job.py", line 439, in execute
    self.run_mapper(self.options.step_num)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/mrjob/job.py", line 499, in run_mapper
    for out_key, out_value in mapper_init() or ():
  File "mr_boom.py", line 7, in mapper_init
    raise Exception('BOOM')
Exception: BOOM

(from lines 1-12 of ssh://ec2-52-37-112-240.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/mnt/var/log/hadoop/userlogs/application_1458861299388_0001/container_1458861299388_0001_01_000005/stderr)

while reading input from s3://mrjob-35cdec11663cb1cb/tmp/mr_boom.davidmarin.20160324.231045.501027/files/README.rst


Step 1 of 1 failed
Killing our SSH tunnel (pid 52847)

Now you can fix the bug and try again, without having to wait for a new cluster to bootstrap.

Note

mrjob can fetch logs from persistent jobs even without SSH set up, but it has to pause 10 minutes to wait for EMR to transfer logs to S3, which defeats the purpose of rapid iteration.