Compaction timing and recovery from failure

[Brennon Church]

Everyone,

I recently had a couple compactions, minors that were promoted to 
majors, take 8 and 10 minutes each.  I eventually killed the 
regionserver underneath them as I'd never seen compactions last that 
long before.  In looking through the logs from the regionserver that was 
killed and watching one of the regions after it was moved over, I saw 
that it took about 3 minutes to compact on the second regionserver.  I 
also noticed that the temporary location for the newly compacted 
storfile matched in both the first (failed/killed) and second 
(succeeded) regionserver log.

My question is this.  If a compaction fails due to a regionserver loss 
mid-compaction, does the regionserver that picks up the region continue 
where the first left off?  Or does it have to start from scratch?

Basically, I'm wondering if waiting an additional 3 minutes or so would 
have finally worked through the region on the first server, or if it was 
truly stuck for some other, unknown reason.

Thanks!

--Brennon