[ 
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-5795?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12720254#action_12720254
 ] 

Jakob Homan commented on HADOOP-5795:
-------------------------------------

bq. That is more general, but what is the use case?
The original motivation was Arun and Owen noticing during the terasort work 
that there were a large number of rpc calls were made during the task 
scheduling and that a bulk method could ameliorate that.  That seems reasonable 
to me.  I'll let Arun lobby further.

One point that came up in discussions is that it would be a good idea to have a 
maximum number of files that can be returned at once in order to not overwhelm 
the namenode.  Whether this is hard-coded or configurable was not decided.

> 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.

Reply via email to