Increasing the size of Region

To indirectly increase the number of regions for a RegionServer, increase the size of the region by using the hbase.hregion.max.filesize property in the hbase-site.xml configuration file. You can 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 through 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, you should retain the default value. You should increase the region size only if your table cells tend to be 100 KB or larger.

	Note
	HBase 0.98 introduced stripe compactions as an experimental feature that also enables administrators to increase the size of regions. For more information, see Experimental: Stripe Compactions on the Apache HBase website.