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What is the difference between MapReduce and Spark?

Spark/Big Datahard0.5 min readPremium
Frequency
Low
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
Globant
Key Concepts Tested
spark
Expert AnswerPremium
92 wordsInterview-ready
**MapReduce**: Disk-based. Each job writes to HDFS between map and reduce. Multi-stage = multiple disk I/O. Latency: minutes to hours per stage. **Spark**: In-memory (when cached). DAG with lazy evaluation. RDD/DataFrame caching. 10–100x faster for iterative (ML, graph). **Why Spark Won**: Iterative algorithms (e.g., PageRank, K-means) run 10–100x faster. Unified batch + streaming. DataFrame API + Catalyst. **Scalability Trade-offs**: Spark needs more memory....
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