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I'm running some I/O intensive Python code on Dask and want to increase the number of threads per worker. I've deployed a Kubernetes cluster that runs Dask distributed via helm. I see from the worker deployment template that the number of threads for a worker is set to the number of CPUs, but I'd like to set the number of threads higher unless that's an anti-pattern. How do I do that?

It looks like from this similar question that I can ssh to the dask scheduler and spin up workers with dask-worker? But ideally I'd be able to configure the worker resources via helm so that I don't have to interact with the scheduler other than submitting jobs to it via the Client.

skeller88
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3 Answers3

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Kubernetes resource limits and requests should match the --memory-limit and --nthreads parameters given to the dask-worker command. For more information please follow the link 1 (Best practices described on Dask`s official documentation) and 2

Mahboob
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Threading in Python is a careful art and is really dependent on your code. To do the easy one, -nprocs should almost certainly be 1, if you want more processes, launch more replicas instead. For the thread count, first remember the GIL means only one thread can be running Python code at a time. So you only get concurrency gains under two main sitations: 1) some threads are blocked on I/O like waiting to hear back from a database or web API or 2) some threads are running non-GIL-bound C code inside NumPy or friends. For the second situation, you still can't get more concurrency than the number of CPUs since that's just how many slots there are to run at once, but the first can benefit from more threads than CPUs in some situations.

coderanger
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There's a limitation of Dask's helm chart that doesn't allow for the setting of --nthreads in the chart. I confirmed this with the Dask team and filed an issue: https://github.com/helm/charts/issues/18708.

In the meantime, use Dask Kubernetes for a higher degree of customization.

skeller88
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