huggingface / huggingface/datasets

Dataset load_from_disk is too slow

Open
#2,547 5 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
bug
Dominant language
Python
Stars
22k
Forks
3.4k
Avg merge
5d 7h
Merged PRs (30d)
17

Description

@lhoestq
## Describe the bug
It's not normal that I have to wait 7-8 hours for a dataset to be loaded from disk, as there are no preprocessing steps, it's only loading it with load_from_disk. I have 96 cpus, however only 1 is used for this, which is inefficient. Moreover, its usage is at 1%... This is happening in the context of a language model training, therefore I'm wasting 100$ each time I have to load the dataset from disk again (because the spot instance was stopped by aws and I need to relaunch it for example).

## Steps to reproduce the bug
Just get the oscar in spanish (around 150GGB) and try to first save in disk and then load the processed dataset. It's not dependent on the task you're doing, it just depends on the size of the text dataset.

## Expected results
I expect the dataset to be loaded in a normal time, by using the whole machine for loading it, I mean if you store the dataset in multiple files (.arrow) and then load it from multiple files, you can use multiprocessing for that and therefore don't waste so much time.

## Environment info

- `datasets` version: 1.8.0
- Platform: Ubuntu 18
- Python version: 3.8

I've seen you're planning to include a streaming mode for load_dataset, but that only saves the downloading and processing time, that's not being a problem for me, you cannot save the pure loading from disk time, therefore that's not a solution for my use case or for anyone who wants to use your library for training a language model.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.