[SPARK-52185][CORE] Automate the thread dump collection for Spark applications

[roczei]

What changes were proposed in this pull request?

When a Java program runs for a long time without giving you any feedback/output, how do you determine what the program might be doing and whether it’s stuck? Thread dumps can help in such case. It shows the status of the threads (if it's running/waiting/blocked) and which part of the code is being executed by each thread, being important to detect deadlocks and which part of the program is running.

The purpose of this pull request is to collect thread dumps at regular intervals. Why? Getting a single thread dump only shows a snapshot of threads, getting several allows us to see if threads are progressing by comparing states.

Collecting thread dump samples from slow Spark executors or drivers can be challenging, especially in YARN or Kubernetes environments.

Actual solutions which are available for debugging:

1. We need to find out where the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is running then run the jstack command manually.
2. Download the thread dumps from the Spark UI. For example: http://localhost:4040/executors/threadDump/?executorId=driver
3. Download the thread dumps via Spark API. For example:

curl "http://localhost:4040/api/v1/applications/local-1747400853731/executors/driver/threads"

Why are the changes needed?

The purpose of this feature request is to automate the thread dump collection at regular intervals. New Spark parameters have been introduced:

• spark.driver.threadDumpCollector.enabled (default value: false)
• spark.executor.threadDumpCollector.enabled (default value: false)
• spark.threadDumpCollector.interval
• spark.threadDumpCollector.dir
• spark.threadDumpCollector.output.type
• spark.threadDumpCollector.include.regex

Example commands

spark-shell  --master local-cluster[2,1,1050] --conf spark.driver.threadDumpCollector.enabled=true --conf spark.executor.threadDumpCollector.enabled=true --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.interval=15s --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.output.type=FILE --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.dir=hdfs:///user/example/jstack_test

The thread dumps will be saved into hdfs:///user/example/jstack_test, example file names: app-20250516161130-0000-driver-2025-05-16_16_12_50.txt, app-20250516161130-0000-0-2025-05-16_16_12_51.txt

spark-shell  --master local-cluster[2,1,1050] --conf spark.driver.threadDumpCollector.enabled=true --conf spark.executor.threadDumpCollector.enabled=true --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.interval=15s --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.output.type=LOG

The thread dumps will be added to the log messages

spark-shell  --master local-cluster[2,1,1050] --conf spark.driver.threadDumpCollector.enabled=true --conf spark.executor.threadDumpCollector.enabled=true --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.interval=15s --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.output.type=LOG --conf spark.threadDumpCollector.include.regex=something

Only those thread dumps will be captured which match the given regular expression (spark.threadDumpCollector.include.regex)

Does this PR introduce any user-facing change?

No

How was this patch tested?

New unit tests have been created and it has been manually tested as well.

Was this patch authored or co-authored using generative AI tooling?

No

[roczei]

This PR is not ready for review because there are some test failures. Currently I am checking them.

[roczei]

These were just intermittent issues, I have rerun the failed tests and all of them passed.

The PR is ready for review.

[roczei]

Hi @yaooqinn,

I noticed that you’ve worked on the ThreadInfo improvements for monitoring APIs (SPARK-44893).

I’ve opened this PR related to thread dumps and I believe your insights would be particularly valuable. Would you mind taking a look when you have a moment?

Thank you in advance!

[github-actions[bot]]

We're closing this PR because it hasn't been updated in a while. This isn't a judgement on the merit of the PR in any way. It's just a way of keeping the PR queue manageable. If you'd like to revive this PR, please reopen it and ask a committer to remove the Stale tag!