I just found the answer in "HBase: The Definitive Guide" It quotes a quote from the BigTable paper -
" If we kept the commit log for each tablet in a separate log file, a very large number of files would be written concurrently in GFS. Depending on the underlying file system implementation on each GFS server, these writes could cause a large number of disk seeks to write to the different physical log files." Cheers, Akash A On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Akash Ashok <thehellma...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > I was just wondering why is there only one instance of HLog? Wouldn't > this incur the overhead of synchronization when more than one region tries > to write to ? Why dnt we have an HLog per HRegion so that they Hregion's > writes are independent of each other? Plz do let me know if I am missing > somethin fundamental here. > > Cheers, > Akash A >