@Riddhi Sam First of all, Spark is not faster than Hadoop. Hadoop is a distributed file system (HDFS) while Spark is a compute engine running on top of Hadoop or your local file system. Spark however is faster than MapReduce which was the first compute engine created when HDFS was created. So, when Hadoop was created, there were only two things. HDFS where data is stored and MapReduce which was the only compute engine on HDFS. To understand how Spark is faster than MapReduce, you need to understand how both MapReduce and Spark works. When a MR job starts, the first step is to read data from disk and run mappers. The output of mappers is stored back on disk. Then Shuffle and sort step starts and reads the mapper output from disk and after shuffle and sort completes, it stores the result back on disk (there is actually some network traffic also when keys for Reduce step are gathered on same node but that's true for Spark also, so let's focus on the disk step only). Then finally the reduce step starts, reads the output from shuffle and sort step and finally stores the result back in HDFS. That's six disk accesses to complete the job. Most Hadoop clusters have 7200 RPM disks which are ridiculously slow. Now, here is how Spark works. Like MapReduce job needs mappers and reducers, Spark has two types of processes. One is transformation and other is action. When you write a Spark job, it consists of a number of transformations and a few actions. When Spark job starts, it creates a DAG (Directed acyclic graph) of the job (steps it is supposed to run as part of the job). Then when a job starts, it looks at the DAG and assume the first 5 steps are transformations. It remembers the steps (the DAG) but doesn't really go to disk to perform the transformations. Then it encounters action. At that point a Spark job goes to disk, performs the first transformation, keeps the result of transformation in memory, performs the second transformation, keeps the result in memory and so on until all the steps complete. The only time it goes back to disk is to write the output of the job. So, two accesses to disk. This makes Spark faster. There are other things in Spark which makes it faster than MapReduce. For example, a rich set of API which enables to accomplish in one Spark job what might require two or more MapReduce jobs running one after the other. Imagine, how slow that would be. There are cases where Spark would spill to disk because of the amount of data and it will be slow but may or may not be as slow as MapReduce because of better rich API. ... View more