Hi Mark, You can take a look at http://allthingshadoop.com/2010/04/28/map-reduce-tips-tricks-your-first-real-cluster/ and http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/03/configuration-parameters-what-can-you-just-ignore/to configure your cluster. Along with the tasks, you can change the child jvm heap size, data.xceivers etc. A good practice is to understand what kind of map reduce programming you will be doing, are your tasks CPU bound or memory bound and accordingly change your base cluster settings.
Best Regards, Sonal <https://github.com/sonalgoyal/hiho>Hadoop ETL and Data Integration<https://github.com/sonalgoyal/hiho> Nube Technologies <http://www.nubetech.co> <http://in.linkedin.com/in/sonalgoyal> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 6:16 AM, Mark <static.void....@gmail.com> wrote: > We have a small 4 node clusters that have 12GB of ram and the cpus are Quad > Core Xeons. > > I'm assuming the defaults aren't that generous so what are some > configuration changes I should make to take advantage of this hardware? Max > map task? Max reduce tasks? Anything else? > > Thanks >