A Snowflake user has a query that is running for a long time. When the user opens the query profiler, it indicates that a lot of data is spilling to disk.
What is causing this to happen?
A Snowflake user has a query that is running for a long time. When the user opens the query profiler, it indicates that a lot of data is spilling to disk.
What is causing this to happen?
When a query in Snowflake indicates a lot of data is spilling to disk, it typically means that the warehouse memory is not sufficient to hold the intermediate query results. In cases where the memory allocated for the compute resources is not enough to process the intermediate data, Snowflake starts to spill this data to local disk. If the local disk is exhausted, the data is then spilled to remote disks. This memory limitation and subsequent spilling can significantly slow down query performance.
D is the correct answer
https://community.snowflake.com/s/article/Performance-impact-from-local-and-remote-disk-spilling
Correct answer is D. The warehouse memory is not sufficient to hold the intermediate query results. For some operations (e.g. duplicate elimination for a huge data set), the amount of memory available for the compute resources used to execute the operation might not be sufficient to hold intermediate results. As a result, the query processing engine will start spilling the data to local disk. If the local disk space is not sufficient, the spilled data is then saved to remote disks. https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/ui-query-profile#queries-too-large-to-fit-in-memory Local disk space is located on the compute nodes that are used to execute Snowflake queries and remote disk is the permanent storage location for all Snowflake data.
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