Hi Otis, Throttling I think is a less needed feature as we typically struggle to keep up with the compaction queue under load. Reducing background noise caused by compactions is more an exercise of tuning the compaction algorithm itself. That is still somewhat of a black art it seems.
As for the OS buffer bypassing, Todd did some work along these lines in HDFS, which helped speeding up HBase (for CDH this went into CDH3u4). Not sure if it is really the same or not, so I leave this for someone else to comment on. But indeed interesting ideas and should be discussed thoroughly. Lars On Jul 7, 2012, at 7:49, Otis Gospodnetic <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Here is something that may be of interest to HBase: > > Lucene 4.0.0-Alpha was recently released. Mike McCandless, sne of the Lucene > developers, wrote a really nice post about new things in this version of > Lucene. The part that I think is interesting for HBase, and that HBase devs > may want to look at (and borrow to use with compactions) is this: > > Reducing merge IO impact > > Merging (consolidating many small segments into a single big one) is a very > IO and CPU intensive operation which can easily interfere with ongoing > searches. In 4.0.0 we now have two ways to reduct this impact: > * Rate-limit the IO caused by ongoing merging, by > callingFSDirectory.setMaxMergeWriteMBPerSec. > > > * Use the new NativeUnixDirectory which bypasses the OS's IO cache for all > merge IO, by using direct IO. This ensures that a merge won't evict hot pages > used by searches. (Note that there is also a native WindowsDirectory, but it > does not yet use direct IO during merging... patches welcome!). > > Remember to also set swappiness to 0 on Linux if you want to maximize search > responsiveness. > > More generally, the APIs that open an input or output file > (Directory.openInput andDirectory.createOutput) now take an IOContext > describing what's being done (e.g., flush vs merge), so you can create a > custom Directory that changes its behavior depending on the context. > > These changes were part of a 2011 Google Summer of Code project (thank you > Varun!). > > > > Thoughts? > > Otis > ---- > Performance Monitoring for Solr / ElasticSearch / HBase - > http://sematext.com/spm
