HBase can get stuck if updates to META are blocked
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                 Key: HBASE-2439
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-2439
             Project: Hadoop HBase
          Issue Type: Bug
            Reporter: Kannan Muthukkaruppan


(We noticed this on a import-style test in a small test cluster.)

If compactions are running slow, and we are doing a lot of region splits, then, 
since META has a much smaller hard-coded memstore flush size (16KB), it quickly 
accumulates lots of store files. Once this exceeds 
"hbase.hstore.blockingStoreFiles", flushes to META become no-ops. This causes 
METAs memstore footprint to grow. Once this exceeds 
"hbase.hregion.memstore.block.multiplier * 16KB", we block further updates to 
META.

In my test setup:
  hbase.hregion.memstore.block.multiplier = 4.
and,
  hbase.hstore.blockingStoreFiles = 15.

And we saw messages of the form:

{code}
2010-04-09 18:37:39,539 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion: 
Blocking updates for 'IPC Server handler 23 on 60020' on region .META.,,1: 
memstore size 64.2k is >= than blocking 64.0k size
{code}

Now, if around the same time the CompactSplitThread does a compaction and 
determines it is going split the region. As part of finishing the split, it 
wants to update META about the daughter regions. 

It'll end up waiting for the META to become unblocked. The single 
CompactSplitThread is now held up, and no further compactions can proceed.  
META's compaction request is itself blocked because the compaction queue will 
never get cleared.

This essentially creates a deadlock and the region server is able to not 
progress any further. Eventually, each region server's CompactSplitThread ends 
up in the same state.



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