The "targets" field is used to record the block location(s of the last allocated block fro a file. It is important to remember this at block allocation time itself so that data written to the block can be recovered if the client dies before it finished writing to the entire block.
Take the case when the client started writing to the 3 datanodes in the pipeline for that block. Now, let's assume that the client died aftre writing 100 bytes to the first two replicas whereas the third replica has only 50 bytes in the block. The namenode holds a lease for this client. If the client dies prematurely, the namenode experiences a timeout for the client and triggers lease recovery for the file(s) that were being written by the client. The namenode has to ensure that all the three replicas are consistent with one another, otherwise readers of the block might see inconsistent data depending on which replica they access. Thus, the namenode has to remember which datanode(s) possibly has replicas of that block. hope this help, dhruba On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Sangmin Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > To clarify my question, what is the need for storing the locations of last > block without being reported by datanodes? > > On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Sangmin Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Hi folks, >> >> I wonder why hadoop.dfs.INodeFileUnderConstruction Class has "targets" >> field. >> Can anyone explain this to me? >> any help would be appreciated. >> >> -sangmin >> >
