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Home/Questions/Spark/Big Data/You are given 10 worker machines with 100 GB RAM and 25 CPU cores. How would you determine the number of executors and the size of each executor?

You are given 10 worker machines with 100 GB RAM and 25 CPU cores. How would you determine the number of executors and the size of each executor?

Spark/Big Dataeasy0.7 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
Meesho
Key Concepts Tested
spark
Expert AnswerPremium
139 wordsInterview-ready
**Why It Matters (Architectural Logic)**: Executor sizing directly impacts job runtime and cost. Over-provision = waste; under-provision = OOM and retries. Balance parallelism vs. overhead. Reserve ~1 executor per worker for OS/daemons. Per node: ~100GB RAM, 25 cores. Typical: 1 core = 1 executor. Executors per node: 4-5 (each ~4-5 cores, ~16-20GB). Leave 1 executor for driver/YARN. Example: 10 workers × 4 executors = 40 executors. Each executor: 4 cores, 16GB (4GB overhead)....
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