4. Increase Size of the Region

The other way to indirectly increase the number of regions for a RegionServer is to increase the size of the region with the hbase.hregion.max.filesize property in the hbase-site.xml configuration file. Administrators increase the number of regions for a RegionServer by increasing the specified size at which new regions are dynamically allocated.

Maximum region size is primarily limited by compactions. Very large compactions can degrade cluster performance. The recommended maximum region size is 10 - 20 Gb. For HBase clusters running version 0.90.x, the maximum recommended region size is 4 Gb and the default is 256 Mb. If you are unable to estimate the size of your tables, retain the default value. Increase the region size only if your table cells tend to be 100 Kb or larger.

	Note
	HBase 0.98 introduces stripe compactions as an experimental feature that also allows administrators to increase the size of regions. For more information, see Experimental:Stripe Compactions at the Apache HBase site.