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Executor vs Driver in Spark

Spark/Big Dataeasy0.4 min readPremium
Frequency
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Asked at 1 company
Category
452
questions in Spark/Big Data
Difficulty Split
88E|81M|283H
in this category
Total Bank
1,863
across 7 categories
Asked at these companies
Presidio
Key Concepts Tested
spark
Expert AnswerPremium
74 wordsInterview-ready
**Why distinction matters**: Driver OOM vs Executor OOM have different causes and fixes. **Driver**: Single process; runs main(); builds DAG; schedules; collects results. Bottleneck for collect(), take(). **Executor**: Workers; run tasks; store cached data. Do the heavy lifting. **Scalability trade-offs**: Driver = single point; executors scale. collect() on large = driver OOM. **Cost implications**: Over-sized driver = waste; undersized = OOM....
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