apache / apache/iceberg-python
ArrowScan materializes entire FileScanTask into memory
- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 1.1k
- Forks
- 581
- Avg merge
- 1d 17h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 78
Description
### Feature Request / Improvement
ArrowScan in PyIceberg does not support true streaming, leading to OOM failures when processing large files (file size > container size). While the API returns an iterator, the implementation eagerly materializes all record batches for a FileScanTask before yielding the first row.
Two primary bottlenecks were identified in the `pyiceberg.io.pyarrow` implementation:
1. The internal scan logic uses a `list()` constructor on the batch iterator, forcing the entire file into memory.
2. The `batch_size` parameter is not forwarded to the underlying PyArrow ds.Scanner, preventing granular memory control. Though, it does fallback to the standard
This behavior makes it impossible to process files larger than the available memory in distributed environments (e.g., Ray workers)
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
Research direction
Start in pyiceberg.io.pyarrow by tracing ArrowScan's FileScanTask batch iteration and the construction of the PyArrow ds.Scanner. Confirm that batches are yielded without eagerly materializing the iterator and that batch_size reaches the scanner; done means large files can be processed without requiring the full task in memory.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- data-engineering, performance
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 65/100