I have HBase instances with 2GB heap that perform ok. I'm sure they would perform better with more RAM, but they are definitely good enough to test queries and so forth. I bet you could probably get down to 1.5 or 1 GB and be stable if you wanted to.
> -----Original Message----- > From: D S [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 11:40 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: HBase & BigTable + History: Can it run decently on a 512MB > machine? What's the difference between the two? > > On 3/5/12, Michael Drzal <[email protected]> wrote: > > You really need to consider the entire historical context here. A lot > > of the memory used in hbase is buffering writes to disk and for the > > block cache. These days, it isn't unreasonable to get 12 2-3TB disks > > in a commodity server. Back in 2003, you would not get as many disks, > > and they would be much smaller. One way to think about it is the > > ratio of RAM/disk space or more operationally what your cache hit > > ratio is and how busy your disk drives are. > > > > Drz > > > > On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 3:25 AM, D S <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> Hi, > >> > >> I'm learning more about HBase and I'm curious how much of HBase is > >> actually based on Google's original dB. In Google's origins stories, > >> they are well known for using low cost commodity hardware in scale in > >> order to store their web database. > >> > >> Almost every blog I read about HBase tells me it's a clone of > >> BigTable. Almost every blog I've read about HBase also tells me to > >> use a lot of RAM - gigabytes worth. Some even tell me not to even > >> consider HBase with less than 4GB of RAM. > >> > >> If I remember my history correctly, a commodity machine in the year > >> 2003 had around 512MB to 1GB of RAM in it. The fancier ones had, 2GB. > >> From everything I've read, running HBase on such machines is a very > >> bad idea yet this was the machines readily available in the year 2003 > >> when Google started it's growth. > >> > >> I'm confused at the moment. Can someone give me a bit of background > >> about how HBase performance is handled from the "low" end which was > >> considered "high" end back then? Should I assume that HBase is just > >> a clone of BigTable? What is HBase's history? Are the blogs wrong? > >> > >> Thanks for any clarification anyone can give. > >> > > > > Is HBase's configuration options robust enough that it could go back and run > well on those 2003 specs by a bit of tweaking if that what was desired?
