Is Hadoop's TooRunner thread-safe?

Question

I would like to trigger a few Hadoop jobs simultaneously. I’ve created a pool of threads using Executors.newFixedThreadPool. Idea is that if the pool size is 2, my code will trigger 2 Hadoop jobs at the same exact time using ‘ToolRunner.run’. In my testing, I noticed that these 2 threads keep stepping on each other.

When I looked under the hood, I noticed that ToolRunner creates GenericOptionsParser which in turn calls a static method ‘buildGeneralOptions’. This method uses ‘OptionBuilder.withArgName’ which uses an instance variable called, ‘argName’. This doesn’t look thread safe to me and I believe is the root cause of issues I am running into.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Confirmed that ToolRunner is NOT thread-safe:

Original code (which runs into problems):

  public static int run(Configuration conf, Tool tool, String[] args) 
throws Exception{
if(conf == null) {
  conf = new Configuration();
}
GenericOptionsParser parser = new GenericOptionsParser(conf, args);
//set the configuration back, so that Tool can configure itself
tool.setConf(conf);

//get the args w/o generic hadoop args
String[] toolArgs = parser.getRemainingArgs();
return tool.run(toolArgs);

}

New Code(which works):

    public static int run(Configuration conf, Tool tool, String[] args)
        throws Exception{
    if(conf == null) {
        conf = new Configuration();
    }
    GenericOptionsParser parser = getParser(conf, args);

    tool.setConf(conf);

    //get the args w/o generic hadoop args
    String[] toolArgs = parser.getRemainingArgs();
    return tool.run(toolArgs);
}

private static synchronized GenericOptionsParser getParser(Configuration conf, String[] args) throws Exception {
    return new GenericOptionsParser(conf, args);
}