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GeezerVison is showing github.com — docs: explain the growing lineage problem of input DataFrames by raviston · Pull Request #933 · graphframes/graphframes

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@raviston

@raviston raviston commented Nov 10, 2026

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What changes were proposed in this pull request?

Closes #746. This adds a "Preparing Input DataFrames" section to the Configurations page, as suggested in the issue:

  • The Growing Lineage Problem: a GraphFrame keeps the input DataFrames together with their full logical plan. Algorithms build every query on top of them, often reference them several times per query, and join them again in every iteration. A long input pipeline is therefore planned again, and recomputed unless it is cached, again and again. The section lists the typical symptoms and explains why the algorithms' own checkpointInterval does not fully solve this.
  • Recommendation: Materialize Complex Inputs: Scala and Python examples that checkpoint the vertices and edges before building the graph, plus a table comparing checkpoint(), localCheckpoint(), writing to a table or files and reading them back, and persist()/cache(). The last one avoids recomputation but does not truncate the lineage. It also covers Spark Connect and when materializing is not worth it.
  • Cross-link: a link to the new section from the existing "Notes on Configuration Usage" list.

Why are the changes needed?

Users who pass DataFrames produced by complex transformations to GraphFrame(vertices, edges) can see very slow planning, or planning failures, without any hint in the docs about the cause or the fix (#746).

Does this PR introduce any user-facing change?

Documentation only.

How was this patch tested?

  • codespell (as in CI) is clean on the changed page.
  • build/sbt docs/laikaHTML reports no errors for this page. The only error is the existing README link to api/python/index.html, which CI builds in an earlier step.
  • A small local experiment backs the recommendation: label propagation on edges built from 30 to 60 chained joins was about 2x faster with checkpoint()/localCheckpoint() inputs than with the raw inputs, while persist() helped less. Because the setup is small and noisy, the docs give no numbers.

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@raviston

raviston commented Nov 10, 2026

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@SemyonSinchenko kindly review this

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@raviston raviston mentioned this pull request Nov 10, 2026
fix: release connectedComponents caches over Spark Connect #932
Open
@raviston @claude
docs: explain the growing lineage problem of input DataFrames
ed911ec
Add a "Preparing Input DataFrames" section to the configurations page.
It explains that a GraphFrame keeps the full plan of its input
DataFrames, so algorithms plan (and, unless cached, recompute) a long
input pipeline again in every query and iteration, and recommends
materializing complex inputs with checkpoint(), localCheckpoint() or a
write and read back before building the graph.

Closes graphframes#746

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
@raviston
raviston force-pushed the doc-746-growing-lineage branch from 33dc198 to ed911ec Compare November 11, 2026 05:47

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doc: document the growing lineage problem

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@raviston
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