For those who are interested, I did some loadtesting of Puts and Gets speeds using PHP -> Thrift Server -> HBASE, and Java API Client -> HBASE.
Writing and reading 5 - 10 byte cells (from Cache), is 30 times faster using Java API client. So I am going to assume that writing near realtime applications like search will be better with Java API, since it takes a while for php to serialize data, send out of the socket and then for Thrift server to talk to HBase. Average reads per row were 0.5 ms with Java, and 15 ms (still fast!) with PHP client. I am thinking that Tomcat with java servlet that does a lot of work on the backend is a way to go. When we set it up, I will follow up with results; Should be just as fast as the HTTP wrap-around should not add significant latency, because we are not doing multiple GETs as most of the logic will be done on the backend. -Jack
