[jira] Commented: (HBASE-1996) Configure scanner buffer in bytes instead of number of rows

["Erik Rozendaal (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-1996?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12784724#action_12784724 ] 

Erik Rozendaal commented on HBASE-1996:
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This feature would be really useful to us. We have a table where the number of columns per row varies greatly. Most of them have less than 100 columns, but some have more than a million. With the current scanner we're pretty much limited to specifying 1-3 rows of caching, which hurts performance in many cases. So being able to specify the size in bytes (with the minimum of one row returned) would be very useful.

I'll try to see if this patch can be applied to our version of HBase (0.20.2) and see how that works.

PS We're also working to reduce the variance of row sizes... >1 million columns is a pain w.r.t. memory usage.


> Configure scanner buffer in bytes instead of number of rows
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HBASE-1996
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-1996
>             Project: Hadoop HBase
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>            Reporter: Dave Latham
>            Assignee: Dave Latham
>             Fix For: 0.21.0
>
>         Attachments: 1966.patch
>
>
> Currently, the default scanner fetches a single row at a time.  This makes for very slow scans on tables where the rows are not large.  You can change the setting for an HTable instance or for each Scan.
> It would be better to have a default that performs reasonably well so that people stop running into slow scans because they are evaluating HBase, aren't familiar with the setting, or simply forgot.  Unfortunately, if we increase the value of the current setting, then we run the risk of running OOM for tables with large rows.  Let's change the setting so that it works with a size in bytes, rather than in rows.  This will allow us to set a reasonable default so that tables with small rows will scan performantly and tables with large rows will not run OOM.
> Note that the case is very similar to table writes as well.  When disabling auto flush, we buffer a list of Put's to commit at once.  That buffer is measured in bytes, so that a small number of large Puts or a lot of small Puts can each fit in a single flush.  If that buffer were measured in number of Put's it would have the same problem that we have for the scan buffer, and we wouldn't be able to set a good default value for tables with different size rows.  Changing the scan buffer to be configured like the write buffer will make it more consistent.

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