Anaconda Enterprise: Documentation

# Opportunistic Caching

EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE added to Version 0.6.2 and above - see disclaimer.

Dask usually removes intermediate values as quickly as possible in order to make space for more data to flow through your computation. However, in some cases, we may want to hold onto intermediate values, because they might be useful for future computations in an interactive session.

We need to balance the following concerns:

1. Intermediate results might be useful in future unknown computations
2. Intermediate results also fill up memory, reducing space for the rest of our current computation.

Negotiating between these two concerns helps us to leverage the memory that we have available to speed up future, unanticipated computations. Which intermediate results should we keep?

This document explains an experimental, opportunistic caching mechanism that automatically picks out and stores useful tasks.

## Motivating Example

Consider computing the maximum value of a column in a CSV file:

    >>> import dask.dataframe as dd
    >>> df = dd.read_csv('myfile.csv')
    >>> df.columns
    ['first-name', 'last-name', 'amount', 'id', 'timestamp']

    >>> df.amount.max().compute()
    1000

Even though our full dataset may be too large to fit in memory, the single `df.amount` column may be small enough to hold in memory just in case it might be useful in the future. This is often the case during data exploration, because we investigate the same subset of our data repeatedly before moving on.

For example, we may now want to find the minimum of the amount column:

    >>> df.amount.min().compute()
    -1000

Under normal operations, this would need to read through the entire CSV file over again. This is somewhat wasteful, and stymies interactive data exploration.

## Two Simple Solutions

If we know ahead of time that we want both the maximum and minimum, we can compute them simultaneously. Dask will share intermediates intelligently, reading through the dataset only once:

    >>> dd.compute(df.amount.max(), df.amount.min())
    (1000, -1000)

If we know that this column fits in memory then we can also explicitly compute the column and then continue forward with straight Pandas:

    >>> amount = df.amount.compute()
    >>> amount.max()
    1000
    >>> amount.min()
    -1000

If either of these solutions work for you, great. Otherwise, continue on for a third approach.

## Automatic Opportunistic Caching

Another approach is to watch all intermediate computations, and guess which ones might be valuable to keep for the future. Dask has an opportunistic caching mechanism that stores intermediate tasks that show the following characteristics:

1. Expensive to compute
2. Cheap to store
3. Frequently used

We can activate a fixed sized cache as a callback.

    >>> from dask.cache import Cache
    >>> cache = Cache(2e9)  # Leverage two gigabytes of memory
    >>> cache.register()    # Turn cache on globally

Now the cache will watch every small part of the computation and judge the value of that part based on the three characteristics listed above (expensive to compute, cheap to store, and frequently used).

Dask will hold on to 2GB of the best intermediate results it can find, evicting older results as better results come in. If the `df.amount` column fits in 2GB then probably all of it will be stored while we keep working on it.

If we start work on something else, then the `df.amount` column will likely be evicted to make space for other more timely results:

    >>> df.amount.max().compute()  # slow the first time
    1000
    >>> df.amount.min().compute()  # fast because df.amount is in the cache
    -1000
    >>> df.id.nunique().compute()  # starts to push out df.amount from cache

## Cache tasks, not expressions

This caching happens at the low-level scheduling layer, not the high-level dask.dataframe or dask.array layer. We don’t explicitly cache the column `df.amount`. Instead, we cache the hundreds of small pieces of that column that form the dask graph. It could be that we end up caching only a fraction of the column.

This means that the opportunistic caching mechanism described above works for all dask computations, as long as those computations employ a consistent naming scheme (as all of dask.dataframe, dask.array, and dask.delayed do.)

You can see which tasks are held by the cache by inspecting the following attributes of the cache object:

    >>> cache.cache.data
    <stored values>
    >>> cache.cache.heap.heap
    <scores of items in cache>
    >>> cache.cache.nbytes
    <number of bytes per item in cache>

The cache object is powered by cachey, a tiny library for opportunistic caching.

## Disclaimer

This feature is still experimental, and can cause your computation to fill up RAM.

Restricting your cache to a fixed size like 2GB requires dask to accurately count the size of each of our objects in memory. This can be tricky, particularly for Pythonic objects like lists and tuples, and for DataFrames that contain object dtypes.

It is entirely possible that the caching mechanism will undercount the size of objects, causing it to use up more memory than anticipated which can lead to blowing up RAM and crashing your session.