Thank you so much for your help! You are right, the slow region server hosts hbase:meta!!! I am using Hbase 0.96.1.1
I have major compactions disabled. I run major compaction manually once a day and when it dpes that besides requesting major compaction on my tables, it also requests a major_compact 'hbase:meta'. Is that what could be causing the issue? I did a scan on 'hbase:meta' and I see that it contains about the same number of regions as it should - I have two tables with ~3000 regions each. Do you think I have some misconfiguration? Do I need to do some cleanup on the meta region? Am I hitting some Hbase bug? Or am I being dumb requesting major compaction for the meta region daily? I believe on the client side I am doing things right - using scanner caching, etc. Thank you so much for your help!!
