Thanks for the reply Stack. My comments are inline. > You've checked out the perf section of the refguide? > > http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#performance
Yes. HBase has 8GB RAM both on my cluster as well as my dev machine. Both configurations are backed by SSDs and Hbase options are set to HBASE_OPTS="-ea -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode" The data that I am dealing with is static. The table never changes after the first load. Even some of my GET requests are taking up to a full 60 seconds when the row sizes reach ~10MB. In general, taking 5 seconds to fetch a single row (~1MB) seems a extremely high to me. Thanks again for your help.
