Honey, I broke awk! (duplicate line removal in 30M line 3.7GB csv file)
I have a script that builds a database ~30 million lines, ~3.7 GB .cvs file. After multiple optimzations It takes about 62 min to bring in and parse all the files and used to take 10 min to remove duplicates until I was requested to add another column. I am using the highly optimized awk code:
In this case a[$0] mearly initializes the array element without writing to it and ($0 in a) aparently accesses an array table but not the elements themselves.
The traditional solution took many hours even with test chunks of the data.
I previously tried to debug some files with corruptions by adding a filename@path column and that exceeded the maximum pipe size. I was asked to add a relatively short column and it does not break any pipes but does not complete even after 12 hours.
I've removed several pipes in my script and replaced them with temp files to hold data between commands, but the addition of that short column has caused the duplicate line removal to go from ~10 minutes to God knows how long.
Any other options to do the duplicate line removal more efficiently (in segments, sorting first, etc.)?
Do I have any other options? My environment is:
GNU Awk 4.0.2
GNU bash, version 4.1.10(4)-release
CYGWIN_NT-6.1-WOW64 1.7.17(0.262/5/3) 2012-10-19 14:39 i686 Cygwin
Windows 7 Enterprise Ver 6.1 Build 7601 Service Pack 1
Last edited by Michael Stora; 03-26-2014 at 05:32 PM..
If I recall correctly, cygwin and win7 not -64 is 32 bit, so 'a' may get too big for the address space of the awk process. Depending on ram size, it might eventually thrash a bit. The awk solution, a hash map, does not support parallism.
The classic, robust solution is 'sort -u <file_set>' but tends to be slower. You can parallelize the sort with a command of the form:
where the nicer ksh or bash makes named pipes of the '<(...)' that run concurrently. I like twice the core count <(sort)'s, assuming 50% i/o delay. The final pass of the <(sort)'s feeds the sort -m merge parent.
ETL programs like Ab Initio know how to tell parallel processes to split up big files and process each part separately, even when the files are linefeed delimited (they all agree to search up (or down) for the dividing linefeed closest to N bytes down file). Does anyone know of a utility that can split a file this way (without reading it sequentially)? 'GNU parallel?'
I highly recommend using linux rather than cygwin for better performance. You might try using a virtual linux image (i.e. vmware). I also sometimes will create a ram disk to speed things up (on linux) when I am processing a lot of lines in a file.
Thanks for all the suggestions. My workaround so far has been to skip the duplicate line removal and add it to the querries I run against the database instead. This has allowed me to procede with my analysis.
I will go back and fix the database at some point however when the current deadline passes.
I will have to check closely which fields alone can indicate a duplicate record. Since the addition of a column (and therefore the length of $0) is what broke it, taking something out may help. I'm not sure as I am already taking the important columns from two types of database files and the "housekeeping columns" are not included.
Is there a way to do a checksum or fairly robust hash in awk? That might be the best way to shorten the array names which appears to what is killing awk.
Mike
PS. I would love to be using real Linux instead of Cygwin (as I do at home). Unfortunately that is a boundary condition.
Last edited by Michael Stora; 03-26-2014 at 08:03 PM..
My file (the output of an experiment) starts off looking like this,
_____________________________________________________________
Subjects incorporated to date: 001
Data file started on machine PKSHS260-05CP
**********************************************************************
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