Question

In the hadoop job counters, what is the difference between “Map output materialized bytes” vs “map output bytes”? I don’t see the former when I disable map output compression so I guess it is the real output bytes (compressed) while the latter is uncompressed bytes?

Answer 1

I think you are right.
From http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r1.0.4/releasenotes.html:

MAPREDUCE-2365. New counters for FileInputFormat (BYTES_READ) and FileOutputFormat (BYTES_WRITTEN). New counter MAP_OUTPUT_MATERIALIZED_BYTES for compressed MapOutputSize. (Siddharth Seth)

(Changes Since Hadoop 0.20.2)

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Here is a quote from Tom White’s “Hadoop Definitive Guide”, 3rd edition (table 8-2, page 261):

“Map output materialized bytes” – The number of bytes of map output actually written to disk. If map output compression is enabled, this is reflected in the counter value.

“Map output bytes” – The number of bytes of uncompressed output produced by all the maps in the job. Incremented every time the collect() method is called on the map’s OutputCollector.