I have a large text file of size around 13gb. I want to process the file using Hadoop. I know that hadoop uses FileInputFormat to create InputSplits which are assigned to mapper tasks. I want to know if hadoop creates these InputSplits sequentially or in parallel. I mean does it read the large text file sequentially on a single host and create split files which are then distributed to datanodes, or does it read chunks of say 50mb in parallel? Does hadoop replicate the big file on multiple hosts before splitting it up?
Is it recommended that I split up the file into 50mb chunks to speed up the processing? There are many questions on appropriate split size for mapper tasks but not the exact split process itself.
Thanks
InputSplits are created in the client side and it just a logical representation of the file in the sense it would only contain the file path,start and end offset values(calculated from linerecordreader initialize function). So calculating this logical rep. will not take much time so need to split your chunks the real execution happens at the mapper end where the execution is done in a parallel way. Then the client places the inputsplits into hdfs and jobtracker takes it from there and depending on the splits it allocates a tasktracker. Now here one mapper execution is not dependent on the other. The second mapper knows very well that where it has to start processing that split, so the mapper executions are done in parallel.