Possible Bug: Small training/dataset file creates gigantic output
> First I think we should disable padding in the dataset processing and let the data collator do it.

No, you can't do that on TPUs as dynamic shapes will result in a very slow training. The script can however be tweaked to use the `PaddingDataCollator` with a fixed max length instead of dynamic batching.

For the other optimizations, they can be done by changing the script directly for each user's use case. Not sure we can find something that is general enough to be in transformers or the examples script.
Hey guys,

I was trying to create a new bert model from scratch via _huggingface transformers + tokenizers + dataets_ (actually using this example script by your team: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/master/examples/language-modeling/run_mlm.py). It was supposed to be a first test with a small 5 GB raw text file but I can't even end the preprocessing handled by datasets because this tiny 5 GB text file becomes more than 1 TB when processing. My system was running out of space and crashed prematurely.

I've done training from scratch via Google's bert repo in the past and I can remember that the resulting pretraining data can become quite big. But 5 GB becoming 1 TB was never the case. Is this considered normal or is it a bug?

I've used the following CMD:
`python xla_spawn.py --num_cores=8 run_mlm.py --model_type bert --config_name config.json --tokenizer_name tokenizer.json --train_file dataset_full.txt --do_train --output_dir out --max_steps 500000 --save_steps 2500 --save_total_limit 2 --prediction_loss_only --line_by_line --max_seq_length 128 --pad_to_max_length --preprocessing_num_workers 16 --per_device_train_batch_size 128 --overwrite_output_dir --debug`


Possible Bug: Small training/dataset file creates gigantic output 
 Hey guys,

I was trying to create a new bert model from scratch via _huggingface transformers + tokenizers + dataets_ (actually using this example script by your team: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/master/examples/language-modeling/run_mlm.py). It was supposed to be a first test with a small 5 GB raw text file but I can't even end the preprocessing handled by datasets because this tiny 5 GB text file becomes more than 1 TB when processing. My system was running out of space and crashed prematurely.

I've done training from scratch via Google's bert repo in the past and I can remember that the resulting pretraining data can become quite big. But 5 GB becoming 1 TB was never the case. Is this considered normal or is it a bug?

I've used the following CMD:
`python xla_spawn.py --num_cores=8 run_mlm.py --model_type bert --config_name config.json --tokenizer_name tokenizer.json --train_file dataset_full.txt --do_train --output_dir out --max_steps 500000 --save_steps 2500 --save_total_limit 2 --prediction_loss_only --line_by_line --max_seq_length 128 --pad_to_max_length --preprocessing_num_workers 16 --per_device_train_batch_size 128 --overwrite_output_dir --debug`

 
 > First I think we should disable padding in the dataset processing and let the data collator do it.

No, you can't do that on TPUs as dynamic shapes will result in a very slow training. The script can however be tweaked to use the `PaddingDataCollator` with a fixed max length instead of dynamic batching.

For the other optimizations, they can be done by changing the script directly for each user's use case. Not sure we can find something that is general enough to be in transformers or the examples script.