RAM, RAM, RAM. Don't starve HBase.

Use a 64-bit platform (and 64-bit JVM).

Watch out for swapping. Set swappiness to 0.

The single most important factor in this configuration is that the switching capacity of the hardware is capable of handling the traffic which can be generated by all systems connected to the switch. Some lower priced commodity hardware can have a slower switching capacity than could be utilized by a full switch.

Multiple switches are a potential pitfall in the architecture. The most common configuration of lower priced hardware is a simple 1Gbps uplink from one switch to another. This often overlooked pinch point can easily become a bottleneck for cluster communication. Especially with MapReduce jobs that are both reading and writing a lot of data the communication across this uplink could be saturated.

Mitigation of this issue is fairly simple and can be accomplished in multiple ways:

Multiple rack configurations carry the same potential issues as multiple switches, and can suffer performance degradation from two main areas:

If the the switches in your rack have appropriate switching capacity to handle all the hosts at full speed, the next most likely issue will be caused by homing more of your cluster across racks. The easiest way to avoid issues when spanning multiple racks is to use port trunking to create a bonded uplink to other racks. The downside of this method however, is in the overhead of ports that could potentially be used. An example of this is, creating an 8Gbps port channel from rack A to rack B, using 8 of your 24 ports to communicate between racks gives you a poor ROI, using too few however can mean you're not getting the most out of your cluster.

Using 10Gbe links between racks will greatly increase performance, and assuming your switches support a 10Gbe uplink or allow for an expansion card will allow you to save your ports for machines as opposed to uplinks.

Are all the network interfaces functioning correctly? Are you sure? See the Troubleshooting Case Study in ???.

The number of regions for an HBase table is driven by the ???. Also, see the architecture section on ???

For larger systems, managing compactions and splits may be something you want to consider.

See ???.

See ???. A memory setting for the RegionServer process.

See ???. This memory setting is often adjusted for the RegionServer process depending on needs.

See ???. This memory setting is often adjusted for the RegionServer process depending on needs.

See ???. If there is blocking in the RegionServer logs, increasing this can help.

See ???. If there is enough RAM, increasing this can help.

Have HBase write the checksum into the datablock and save having to do the checksum seek whenever you read. See the release note on HBASE-5074 support checksums in HBase block cache.

See ???.

See ???. See also Section 1.6.7.1, “However...” for compression caveats.

The regionsize can be set on a per-table basis via setFileSize on HTableDescriptor in the event where certain tables require different regionsizes than the configured default regionsize.

See Section 1.4.1, “Number of Regions” for more information.

Bloom Filters can be enabled per-ColumnFamily. Use HColumnDescriptor.setBloomFilterType(NONE | ROW | ROWCOL) to enable blooms per Column Family. Default = NONE for no bloom filters. If ROW, the hash of the row will be added to the bloom on each insert. If ROWCOL, the hash of the row + column family + column family qualifier will be added to the bloom on each key insert.

See HColumnDescriptor and Section 1.8.9, “Bloom Filters” for more information or this answer up in quora, How are bloom filters used in HBase?.

The blocksize can be configured for each ColumnFamily in a table, and this defaults to 64k. Larger cell values require larger blocksizes. There is an inverse relationship between blocksize and the resulting StoreFile indexes (i.e., if the blocksize is doubled then the resulting indexes should be roughly halved).

See HColumnDescriptor and ???for more information.

ColumnFamilies can optionally be defined as in-memory. Data is still persisted to disk, just like any other ColumnFamily. In-memory blocks have the highest priority in the ???, but it is not a guarantee that the entire table will be in memory.

See HColumnDescriptor for more information.

Production systems should use compression with their ColumnFamily definitions. See ??? for more information.

Use the bulk load tool if you can. See ???. Otherwise, pay attention to the below.

Tables in HBase are initially created with one region by default. For bulk imports, this means that all clients will write to the same region until it is large enough to split and become distributed across the cluster. A useful pattern to speed up the bulk import process is to pre-create empty regions. Be somewhat conservative in this, because too-many regions can actually degrade performance.

There are two different approaches to pre-creating splits. The first approach is to rely on the default HBaseAdmin strategy (which is implemented in Bytes.split)...

byte[] startKey = ...;   	// your lowest keuy
byte[] endKey = ...;   		// your highest key
int numberOfRegions = ...;	// # of regions to create
admin.createTable(table, startKey, endKey, numberOfRegions);

And the other approach is to define the splits yourself...

byte[][] splits = ...;   // create your own splits
admin.createTable(table, splits);

See ??? for issues related to understanding your keyspace and pre-creating regions.

The default behavior for Puts using the Write Ahead Log (WAL) is that HLog edits will be written immediately. If deferred log flush is used, WAL edits are kept in memory until the flush period. The benefit is aggregated and asynchronous HLog- writes, but the potential downside is that if the RegionServer goes down the yet-to-be-flushed edits are lost. This is safer, however, than not using WAL at all with Puts.

Deferred log flush can be configured on tables via HTableDescriptor. The default value of hbase.regionserver.optionallogflushinterval is 1000ms.

When performing a lot of Puts, make sure that setAutoFlush is set to false on your HTable instance. Otherwise, the Puts will be sent one at a time to the RegionServer. Puts added via htable.add(Put) and htable.add( <List> Put) wind up in the same write buffer. If autoFlush = false, these messages are not sent until the write-buffer is filled. To explicitly flush the messages, call flushCommits. Calling close on the HTable instance will invoke flushCommits.

A frequently discussed option for increasing throughput on Puts is to call writeToWAL(false). Turning this off means that the RegionServer will not write the Put to the Write Ahead Log, only into the memstore, HOWEVER the consequence is that if there is a RegionServer failure there will be data loss. If writeToWAL(false) is used, do so with extreme caution. You may find in actuality that it makes little difference if your load is well distributed across the cluster.

In general, it is best to use WAL for Puts, and where loading throughput is a concern to use bulk loading techniques instead.

In addition to using the writeBuffer, grouping Puts by RegionServer can reduce the number of client RPC calls per writeBuffer flush. There is a utility HTableUtil currently on TRUNK that does this, but you can either copy that or implement your own verison for those still on 0.90.x or earlier.

When writing a lot of data to an HBase table from a MR job (e.g., with TableOutputFormat), and specifically where Puts are being emitted from the Mapper, skip the Reducer step. When a Reducer step is used, all of the output (Puts) from the Mapper will get spooled to disk, then sorted/shuffled to other Reducers that will most likely be off-node. It's far more efficient to just write directly to HBase.

For summary jobs where HBase is used as a source and a sink, then writes will be coming from the Reducer step (e.g., summarize values then write out result). This is a different processing problem than from the the above case.

If all your data is being written to one region at a time, then re-read the section on processing timeseries data.

Also, if you are pre-splitting regions and all your data is still winding up in a single region even though your keys aren't monotonically increasing, confirm that your keyspace actually works with the split strategy. There are a variety of reasons that regions may appear "well split" but won't work with your data. As the HBase client communicates directly with the RegionServers, this can be obtained via HTable.getRegionLocation.

See Section 1.7.2, “ Table Creation: Pre-Creating Regions ”, as well as Section 1.4, “HBase Configurations”

If HBase is used as an input source for a MapReduce job, for example, make sure that the input Scan instance to the MapReduce job has setCaching set to something greater than the default (which is 1). Using the default value means that the map-task will make call back to the region-server for every record processed. Setting this value to 500, for example, will transfer 500 rows at a time to the client to be processed. There is a cost/benefit to have the cache value be large because it costs more in memory for both client and RegionServer, so bigger isn't always better.

Whenever a Scan is used to process large numbers of rows (and especially when used as a MapReduce source), be aware of which attributes are selected. If scan.addFamily is called then all of the attributes in the specified ColumnFamily will be returned to the client. If only a small number of the available attributes are to be processed, then only those attributes should be specified in the input scan because attribute over-selection is a non-trivial performance penalty over large datasets.

When columns are selected explicitly with scan.addColumn, HBase will schedule seek operations to seek between the selected columns. When rows have few columns and each column has only a few versions this can be inefficient. A seek operation is generally slower if does not seek at least past 5-10 columns/versions or 512-1024 bytes.

In order to opportunistically look ahead a few columns/versions to see if the next column/version can be found that way before a seek operation is scheduled, a new attribute Scan.HINT_LOOKAHEAD can be set the on Scan object. The following code instructs the RegionServer to attempt two iterations of next before a seek is scheduled:

Scan scan = new Scan();
scan.addColumn(...);
scan.setAttribute(Scan.HINT_LOOKAHEAD, Bytes.toBytes(2));
table.getScanner(scan);

For MapReduce jobs that use HBase tables as a source, if there a pattern where the "slow" map tasks seem to have the same Input Split (i.e., the RegionServer serving the data), see the Troubleshooting Case Study in ???.

This isn't so much about improving performance but rather avoiding performance problems. If you forget to close ResultScanners you can cause problems on the RegionServers. Always have ResultScanner processing enclosed in try/catch blocks...

Scan scan = new Scan();
// set attrs...
ResultScanner rs = htable.getScanner(scan);
try {
  for (Result r = rs.next(); r != null; r = rs.next()) {
  // process result...
} finally {
  rs.close();  // always close the ResultScanner!
}
htable.close();

Scan instances can be set to use the block cache in the RegionServer via the setCacheBlocks method. For input Scans to MapReduce jobs, this should be false. For frequently accessed rows, it is advisable to use the block cache.

When performing a table scan where only the row keys are needed (no families, qualifiers, values or timestamps), add a FilterList with a MUST_PASS_ALL operator to the scanner using setFilter. The filter list should include both a FirstKeyOnlyFilter and a KeyOnlyFilter. Using this filter combination will result in a worst case scenario of a RegionServer reading a single value from disk and minimal network traffic to the client for a single row.

When performing a high number of concurrent reads, monitor the data spread of the target tables. If the target table(s) have too few regions then the reads could likely be served from too few nodes.

See Section 1.7.2, “ Table Creation: Pre-Creating Regions ”, as well as Section 1.4, “HBase Configurations”

Enabling Bloom Filters can save your having to go to disk and can help improve read latencys.

Bloom filters were developed over in HBase-1200 Add bloomfilters.^[2][3]

See also Section 1.6.4, “Bloom Filters”.

HBase tables are sometimes used as queues. In this case, special care must be taken to regularly perform major compactions on tables used in this manner. As is documented in ???, marking rows as deleted creates additional StoreFiles which then need to be processed on reads. Tombstones only get cleaned up with major compactions.

See also ??? and HBaseAdmin.majorCompact.

Be aware that htable.delete(Delete) doesn't use the writeBuffer. It will execute an RegionServer RPC with each invocation. For a large number of deletes, consider htable.delete(List).

See http://hbase.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/client/HTable.html#delete%28org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.Delete%29

The original use-case for HDFS was batch processing. As such, there low-latency reads were historically not a priority. With the increased adoption of Apache HBase this is changing, and several improvements are already in development. See the Umbrella Jira Ticket for HDFS Improvements for HBase.

Since Hadoop 1.0.0 (also 0.22.1, 0.23.1, CDH3u3 and HDP 1.0) via HDFS-2246, it is possible for the DFSClient to take a "short circuit" and read directly from disk instead of going through the DataNode when the data is local. What this means for HBase is that the RegionServers can read directly off their machine's disks instead of having to open a socket to talk to the DataNode, the former being generally much faster^[4]. Also see HBase, mail # dev - read short circuit thread for more discussion around short circuit reads.

To enable "short circuit" reads, you must set two configurations. First, the hdfs-site.xml needs to be amended. Set the property dfs.block.local-path-access.user to be the only user that can use the shortcut. This has to be the user that started HBase. Then in hbase-site.xml, set dfs.client.read.shortcircuit to be true

For optimal performance when short-circuit reads are enabled, it is recommended that HDFS checksums are disabled. To maintain data integrity with HDFS checksums disabled, HBase can be configured to write its own checksums into its datablocks and verify against these. See Section 1.4.9, “hbase.regionserver.checksum.verify”.

The DataNodes need to be restarted in order to pick up the new configuration. Be aware that if a process started under another username than the one configured here also has the shortcircuit enabled, it will get an Exception regarding an unauthorized access but the data will still be read.

A fairly common question on the dist-list is why HBase isn't as performant as HDFS files in a batch context (e.g., as a MapReduce source or sink). The short answer is that HBase is doing a lot more than HDFS (e.g., reading the KeyValues, returning the most current row or specified timestamps, etc.), and as such HBase is 4-5 times slower than HDFS in this processing context. Not that there isn't room for improvement (and this gap will, over time, be reduced), but HDFS will always be faster in this use-case.