I guess you only have 1 table and you write to it sequentially such that the regions that get moved are the ones you're not writing to? Then yeah it's unusable but also you might be doing wrong (if that's really your situation). You need to make sure you don't end up writing to the latest regions, this blog post describes it best http://ikaisays.com/2011/01/25/app-engine-datastore-tip-monotonically-increasing-values-are-bad/
In any case, the load balancer was improved quite a bit in 0.90.2 (the RC was voted for release yesterday, should be out real soon) mainly in this jira https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-3586 J-D > hello, > > I am encountering the same problem with 0.90.1. All the created regions (via > inserting puts via java api) are assigned to a single region server. What is > interesting is that the load balancing works, since the number of regions is > changing on all regionservers - some 'old' regions on the highly loaded > regionserver are being re-assigned to other regionservers. I guess this is a > bug, since the system is sort of unusable like this. >
