Administrators who expect their HBase clusters to host large amounts of data should consider the affect that compactions have on write throughput. For write-intensive data request patterns, administrators should consider less frequent compactions and more store files per region. Use the hbase.hstore.compaction.min property in the hbase- site.xml configuration file to increase the minimum number of files required to trigger a compaction. Administrators opting to increase this value should also increase the value assigned to the hbase.hstore.blockingStoreFiles property since more files will accumulate.

Pre-split Tables

Administrators can pre-split tables during table creation based on the target number of regions per RegionServer to avoid costly dynamic splitting as the table starts to fill up. In addition, it ensures that the regions in the pre-split table are distributed across many host machines. Pre-splitting a table avoids the cost of compactions required to rewrite the data into separate physical files during automatic splitting. If a table is expected to grow very large, administrators should create at least one region per RegionServer. However, do not immediately split the table into the total number of desired regions. Rather, choose a low to intermediate value. For multiple tables, do not create more than one region per RegionServer, especially if you are uncertain how large the table will grow. Creating too many regions for a table that will never exceed 100 MB in size isn't useful; a single region can adequately services a table of this size.

Configure the JVM Garbage Collector

A RegionServer cannot utilize a very large heap due to the cost of garbage collection. Administrators should specify no more than 24 GB for one RegionServer.