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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-12728?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14259514#comment-14259514
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Aaron Beppu commented on HBASE-12728:
-------------------------------------
[~sduskis] Sorry, was offline for the holidays. Our use case is an online
system. Our clients send us a steady stream of data points, which drive our ML
system. Because our clients mostly benefit from the aggregate experience of our
ML system, it's acceptable to us if some small minority of writes are lost,
though naturally we'd prefer that loss to be zero or negligible. So currently
each individual handler uses the HTablePool to acquire a table, and "writes" to
it, and we set autoflush to false such that only a minority of those "writes"
actually triggers a flush.
Honestly, I could be convinced that this choice on our part was misguided, but
I would hasten to point out that there exists "blessed" documentation [1] which
explicitly advises setting autoflush to false when handling a large write
volume.
It would certainly be possible for us to manage our own write buffer.
Similarly, it would be possible for us to manage our own table pool. In either
case, in our migration (from 0.94 to 0.98.6), we're replicating some
functionality which was previously part of hbase-client.
[1] SS 14.8.4 http://hbase.apache.org/book/perf.writing.html
> buffered writes substantially less useful after removal of HTablePool
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: HBASE-12728
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-12728
> Project: HBase
> Issue Type: Bug
> Components: hbase
> Affects Versions: 0.98.0
> Reporter: Aaron Beppu
>
> In previous versions of HBase, when use of HTablePool was encouraged, HTable
> instances were long-lived in that pool, and for that reason, if autoFlush was
> set to false, the table instance could accumulate a full buffer of writes
> before a flush was triggered. Writes from the client to the cluster could
> then be substantially larger and less frequent than without buffering.
> However, when HTablePool was deprecated, the primary justification seems to
> have been that creating HTable instances is cheap, so long as the connection
> and executor service being passed to it are pre-provided. A use pattern was
> encouraged where users should create a new HTable instance for every
> operation, using an existing connection and executor service, and then close
> the table. In this pattern, buffered writes are substantially less useful;
> writes are as small and as frequent as they would have been with
> autoflush=true, except the synchronous write is moved from the operation
> itself to the table close call which immediately follows.
> More concretely :
> ```
> // Given these two helpers ...
> private HTableInterface getAutoFlushTable(String tableName) throws
> IOException {
> // (autoflush is true by default)
> return storedConnection.getTable(tableName, executorService);
> }
> private HTableInterface getBufferedTable(String tableName) throws IOException
> {
> HTableInterface table = getAutoFlushTable(tableName);
> table.setAutoFlush(false);
> return table;
> }
> // it's my contention that these two methods would behave almost identically,
> // except the first will hit a synchronous flush during the put call,
> and the second will
> // flush during the (hidden) close call on table.
> private void writeAutoFlushed(Put somePut) throws IOException {
> try (HTableInterface table = getAutoFlushTable(tableName)) {
> table.put(somePut); // will do synchronous flush
> }
> }
> private void writeBuffered(Put somePut) throws IOException {
> try (HTableInterface table = getBufferedTable(tableName)) {
> table.put(somePut);
> } // auto-close will trigger synchronous flush
> }
> ```
> For buffered writes to actually provide a performance benefit to users, one
> of two things must happen:
> - The writeBuffer itself shouldn't live, flush and die with the lifecycle of
> it's HTableInstance. If the writeBuffer were managed elsewhere and had a long
> lifespan, this could cease to be an issue. However, if the same writeBuffer
> is appended to by multiple tables, then some additional concurrency control
> will be needed around it.
> - Alternatively, there should be some pattern for having long-lived HTable
> instances. However, since HTable is not thread-safe, we'd need multiple
> instances, and a mechanism for leasing them out safely -- which sure sounds a
> lot like the old HTablePool to me.
> See discussion on mailing list here :
> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hbase-user/201412.mbox/%3CCAPdJLkEzmUQZ_kvD%3D8mrxi4V%3DhCmUp3g9MUZsddD%2Bmon%2BAvNtg%40mail.gmail.com%3E
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