Hi all! We have been using HBase 0.20.4 (cdh3b1) in production on 2 nodes for a few months now and we are having constant issues with it. We fell over all standard traps (like "Too many open files", network configuration problems,...). All in all, we had about one crash every week or so. Fortunately we are still using it just for background processing so our service didn't suffer directly, but we have lost huge amounts of time just fixing the data errors that resulted from data not being written to permanent storage. Not to mention fixing the issues. As you can probably understand, we are very frustrated with this and are seriously considering moving to another bigtable.
Right now, HBase crashes whenever we run very intensive rebuild of secondary index (normal table, but we use it as secondary index) to a huge table. I have found this: http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase/Troubleshooting (see problem 9) One of the lines read: "Make sure you give plenty of RAM (in hbase-env.sh), the default of 1GB won't be able to sustain long running imports." So, if I understand correctly, no matter how HBase is set up, if I run an intensive enough application, it will choke? I would expect it to be slower when under (too much) pressure, but not to crash. Of course, we will somehow solve this issue (working on it), but... :( What are your experiences with HBase? Is it stable? Is it just us and the way we set it up? Also, would upgrading to 0.89 (cdh3b3) help? Thanks, Anze
