Architecting HBase Applications

Chapter 4. HBase Sizing and Tuning Overview

The two most important aspects of building an HBase appplication are sizing and schema design. This chapter will focus on the sizing considerations to take into account when building an application. We will discuss schema design in Part II.

In addition to negatively impacting performance, sizing an HBase cluster incorrectly will reduce stability. Many clusters that are undersized tend to suffer from client timeouts, RegionServer failures, and longer recovery times. Meanwhile, a properly sized and tuned HBase cluster will perform better and meet SLAs on a consistent level because the internals will have less fluctuation, which in turn means fewer compactions (major and minor), fewer region splits, and less block cache churn.

Sizing an HBase cluster is a fine art that requires an understanding of the application needs prior to deploying. You will want to make sure to understand both the read and the write access patterns before attempting to size the cluster. Because it involves taking numerous aspects into consideration, proper HBase sizing can be challenging. Before beginning cluster sizing, it’s important to analyze the requirements for the project. These requirements should be broken down into three categories:

Workload

This requires understanding general concurrency, usage patterns, and ingress/egress workloads.

Service-level agreements (SLAs)

You should have an SLA that guarantees fully quantified read and write latencies, and ...