PySpark: java.lang.OutofMemoryError: Java heap space

I had the same problem with pyspark (installed with brew). In my case it was installed on the path /usr/local/Cellar/apache-spark.

The only configuration file I had was in apache-spark/2.4.0/libexec/python//test_coverage/conf/spark-defaults.conf.

As suggested here I created the file spark-defaults.conf in the path /usr/local/Cellar/apache-spark/2.4.0/libexec/conf/spark-defaults.conf and appended to it the line spark.driver.memory 12g.

After trying out loads of configuration parameters, I found that there is only one need to be changed to enable more Heap space and i.e. spark.driver.memory.

sudo vim $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf
#uncomment the spark.driver.memory and change it according to your use. I changed it to below
spark.driver.memory 15g
# press : and then wq! to exit vim editor

Close your existing spark application and re run it. You will not encounter this error again. :)

If you're looking for the way to set this from within the script or a jupyter notebook, you can do:

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

spark = SparkSession.builder \
    .master('local[*]') \
    .config("spark.driver.memory", "15g") \
    .appName('my-cool-app') \
    .getOrCreate()