**Why it matters**: At scale, design choices directly impact reliability, latency, and cost. Wrong decisions compound across jobs and teams.
Optimize slow production job: (1) Identify bottleneck—Spark UI, stage duration, skew. (2) Fix skew—salting, split hot keys. (3) Tune resources—executor memory/cores, parallelism. (4) Optimize logic—remove unnecessary shuffles, use broadcast. (5) Data—partition pruning, file compaction. (6) Consider incremental processing....
The complete answer continues with detailed implementation patterns, architectural trade-offs, and production-grade considerations. It covers performance optimization strategies, common pitfalls to avoid, and real-world examples from companies like HashedIn. The answer also includes follow-up discussion points that interviewers commonly explore.
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