Task not serializable: java.io.NotSerializableException when calling function outside closure only on classes not objects

Question

Getting strange behavior when calling function outside of a closure:

• when function is in a object everything is working
• when function is in a class ge

Answer 1

FYI in Spark 2.4 a lot of you will probably encounter this issue. Kryo serialization has gotten better but in many cases you cannot use spark.kryo.unsafe=true or the naive kryo serializer.

For a quick fix try changing the following in your Spark configuration

spark.kryo.unsafe="false"

OR

spark.serializer="org.apache.spark.serializer.JavaSerializer"

I modify custom RDD transformations that I encounter or personally write by using explicit broadcast variables and utilizing the new inbuilt twitter-chill api, converting them from rdd.map(row => to rdd.mapPartitions(partition => { functions.

Example

Old (not-great) Way

val sampleMap = Map("index1" -> 1234, "index2" -> 2345)
val outputRDD = rdd.map(row => {
    val value = sampleMap.get(row._1)
    value
})

Alternative (better) Way

import com.twitter.chill.MeatLocker
val sampleMap = Map("index1" -> 1234, "index2" -> 2345)
val brdSerSampleMap = spark.sparkContext.broadcast(MeatLocker(sampleMap))

rdd.mapPartitions(partition => {
    val deSerSampleMap = brdSerSampleMap.value.get
    partition.map(row => {
        val value = sampleMap.get(row._1)
        value
    }).toIterator
})

This new way will only call the broadcast variable once per partition which is better. You will still need to use Java Serialization if you do not register classes.