[ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-5795?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12720235#action_12720235 ]
Doug Cutting commented on HADOOP-5795: -------------------------------------- > Would it be better to pass in an array of BlockLocationRequests, each of > which would consist of the path, start and length? That is more general, but what is the use case? The motivating use case for listBlockLocations() is map reduce split construction, which typically takes a list of files as input, not a list of sections of files. Adding a feature that won't be used will just make this new API harder to use. -1 without a compelling use case. > Add a bulk FIleSystem.getFileBlockLocations > ------------------------------------------- > > Key: HADOOP-5795 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-5795 > Project: Hadoop Core > Issue Type: New Feature > Components: dfs > Affects Versions: 0.20.0 > Reporter: Arun C Murthy > Assignee: Jakob Homan > Fix For: 0.21.0 > > > Currently map-reduce applications (specifically file-based input-formats) use > FileSystem.getFileBlockLocations to compute splits. However they are forced > to call it once per file. > The downsides are multiple: > # Even with a few thousand files to process the number of RPCs quickly > starts getting noticeable > # The current implementation of getFileBlockLocations is too slow since > each call results in 'search' in the namesystem. Assuming a few thousand > input files it results in that many RPCs and 'searches'. > It would be nice to have a FileSystem.getFileBlockLocations which can take in > a directory, and return the block-locations for all files in that directory. > We could eliminate both the per-file RPC and also the 'search' by a 'scan'. > When I tested this for terasort, a moderate job with 8000 input files the > runtime halved from the current 8s to 4s. Clearly this is much more important > for latency-sensitive applications... -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.