> From: stack <[email protected]>
> Reply-To: <[email protected]>
> Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:55:52 -0800
> To: <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Hbase pausing problems
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Seraph Imalia <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Does this mean that when 1 regionserver does a memstore flush, the other
>> two
>> regionservers are also unavailable for writes? I have watched the logs
>> carefully to make sure that not all the regionservers are flushing at the
>> same time. Most of the time, only 1 server flushes at a time and in rare
>> cases, I have seen two at a time.
>>
>> No.
>
> Flush is background process. Reads and writes go ahead while flushing is
> happening.
This is very nice to know: it is what I expected, but it also means that
this problem is solvable :)
>
>
>
>>>
>>> It also looks like you have little RAM space given over to hbase, just
>> 1G?
>>> If your traffic is bursty, giving hbase more RAM might help it get over
>>> these write humps.
>>
>> I have it at 1G on purpose. When we first had the problem, I immediately
>> thought the problem was resource related, so I increased the hBase RAM to
>> 3G
>> (each server has 8G - I was carefull to watch for swapping). This made the
>> problem worse because each memstore flush took longer which stopped writing
>> for longer and people started noticing that our system was down during
>> those
>> periods.
>
>
> See above, flushing doesn't block read/writes. Maybe this was something
> else? A GC pause that ran longer because heap is bigger? You said you had
> gc logging enabled. Did you see any long pauses? (Our ZooKeeper brothers
> suggest https://gchisto.dev.java.net/ as a help reading GC logs).
>
Thanks this tool will be useful - I'll run through the GC Logs and see if
anything jumps out at me.
> Let me look at your logs to see if I see anything else up there.
>
>
>
>>> Clients will be blocked writing regions carried by the effected
>> regionserver
>>> only. Your HW is not appropriate to the load as currently setup. You
>> might
>>> also consider adding more machines to your cluster.
>>>
>>
>> Hmm... How does hBase decide which region to write to? Is it possible that
>> hBase is deciding to write all our current records to one specific region
>> that happens to be on the server that is busy doing a memstore flush?
>>
>>
> Checkout the region list in master UI. See how they are defined by their
> start and end key. Clients write rows to the region hosting the pertinent
> row-span.
I have attached the region list of the AdDelivery. Please let me know if
this is something that you need me to upload to a server somewhere?
>
> Its quiet possible all writes are going to a single region on a single
> server -- which is often an issue -- if your key scheme has something like
> current time for a prefix.
We are using UUID.randomUUID() as the row key - it has a pretty random
prefix.
>
>
>
>> We are currently inserting about 6 million rows per day.
>
>
> 6M rows is low, even for a cluster as small as yours (though, maybe your
> inserts are fat? Big cells, many at a time?).
Inserts contain a maximum of 30 cells - most of the cells are type string
containing integers. About 3 are strings containing no more than 10
characters, and about 4 are type string containing a decimal value. Not all
30 cells will exist, most often, some are left out because the data was not
necessary for that specific row. Most rows will contain 25 cells.
>
>
>
>> SQL Server (which
>> I am so happy to no longer be using for this) was able to write (and
>> replicate to a slave) 9 million records (using the same spec'ed server). I
>> would like to see hBase cope with the 3 we have given it at least when
>> inserting 6 million. Do you think this is possible or is our only answer
>> to
>> throw on more servers?
>>
>> 3 servers should be well able. Tell me more about your schema -- though,
> nevermind, i can find it in your master log.
> St.Ack
>
Cool :)
Seraph
>
>
>>> St.Ack
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Thank you for your assistance thus far; please let me know if you need
>> or
>>>> discover anything else?
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Seraph
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> From: Jean-Daniel Cryans <[email protected]>
>>>>> Reply-To: <[email protected]>
>>>>> Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:49:16 -0800
>>>>> To: <[email protected]>
>>>>> Subject: Re: Hbase pausing problems
>>>>>
>>>>> The next step would be to take a look at your region server's log
>>>>> around the time of the insert and clients who don't resume after the
>>>>> loss of a region server. If you are able to gzip them and put them on
>>>>> a public server, it would be awesome.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thx,
>>>>>
>>>>> J-D
>>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 1:03 AM, Seraph Imalia <[email protected]>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> Answers below...
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>> Seraph
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> From: stack <[email protected]>
>>>>>>> Reply-To: <[email protected]>
>>>>>>> Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:10:39 -0800
>>>>>>> To: <[email protected]>
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: Hbase pausing problems
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> How many CPUs?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1x Quad Xeon in each server
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> You are using default JVM settings (see HBASE_OPTS in hbase-env.sh).
>>>> You
>>>>>>> might want to enable GC logging. See the line after hbase-env.sh.
>>>> Enable
>>>>>>> it. GC logging might tell you about the pauses you are seeing.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I will enable GC Logging tonight during our slow time because
>> restarting
>>>> the
>>>>>> regionservers causes the clients to pause indefinitely.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Can you get a fourth server for your cluster and run the master, zk,
>>>> and
>>>>>>> namenode on it and leave the other three servers for regionserver and
>>>>>>> datanode (with perhaps replication == 2 as per J-D to lighten load on
>>>> small
>>>>>>> cluster).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We plan to double the number of servers in the next few weeks and I
>> will
>>>>>> take your advice to put the master, zk and namenode on it (we will
>> need
>>>> to
>>>>>> have a second one on standby should this one crash). The servers will
>>>> be
>>>>>> ordered shortly and will be here in a week or two.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> That said, I have been monitoring CPU usage and none of them seem
>>>>>> particularly busy. The regionserver on each one hovers around 30% all
>>>> the
>>>>>> time and the datanode sits at about 10% most of the time. If we do
>> have
>>>> a
>>>>>> resource issue, it definitely does not seem to be CPU.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Increasing RAM did not seem to work either - it just made hBase use a
>>>> bigger
>>>>>> memstore and then it took longer to do a flush.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> More notes inline in below.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 1:33 AM, Seraph Imalia <[email protected]>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Approximately every 10 minutes, our entire coldfusion system pauses
>> at
>>>> the
>>>>>>>> point of inserting into hBase for between 30 and 60 seconds and then
>>>>>>>> continues.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Yeah, enable GC logging. See if you can make correlation between
>> the
>>>> pause
>>>>>>> the client is seeing and a GC pause.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Investigation...
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Watching the logs of the regionserver, the pausing of the coldfusion
>>>> system
>>>>>>>> happens as soon as one of the regionservers starts flushing the
>>>> memstore
>>>>>>>> and
>>>>>>>> recovers again as soon as it is finished flushing (recovers as soon
>> as
>>>> it
>>>>>>>> starts compacting).
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> ...though, this would seem to point to an issue with your hardware.
>>>> How
>>>>>>> many disks? Are they misconfigured such that they hold up the system
>>>> when
>>>>>>> they are being heavily written to?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A regionserver log at DEBUG from around this time so we could look at
>>>> it
>>>>>>> would be helpful.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I can recreate the error just by stopping 1 of the regionservers; but
>>>> then
>>>>>>>> starting the regionserver again does not make coldfusion recover
>> until
>>>> I
>>>>>>>> restart the coldfusion servers. It is important to note that if I
>>>> keep the
>>>>>>>> built in hBase shell running, it is happily able to put and get data
>>>> to and
>>>>>>>> from hBase whilst coldfusion is busy pausing/failing.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This seems odd. Enable DEBUG for the client-side. Do you see the
>>>> shell
>>>>>>> recalibrating finding new locations for regions after you shutdown
>> the
>>>>>>> single regionserver, something that your coldfusion is not doing?
>> Or,
>>>>>>> maybe, the shell is putting a regionserver that has not been
>> disturbed
>>>> by
>>>>>>> your start/stop?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I have tried increasing the regionserver¹s RAM to 3 Gigs and this
>> just
>>>> made
>>>>>>>> the problem worse because it took longer for the regionservers to
>>>> flush the
>>>>>>>> memory store.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Again, if flushing is holding up the machine, if you can't write a
>> file
>>>> in
>>>>>>> background without it freezing your machine, then your machines are
>>>> anemic
>>>>>>> or misconfigured?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> One of the links I found on your site mentioned increasing
>>>>>>>> the default value for hbase.regionserver.handler.count to 100 this
>>>> did
>>>>>>>> not
>>>>>>>> seem to make any difference.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Leave this configuration in place I'd say.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Are you seeing 'blocking' messages in the regionserver logs?
>>>> Regionserver
>>>>>>> will stop taking on writes if it thinks its being overrun to prevent
>>>> itself
>>>>>>> OOME'ing. Grep the 'multiplier' configuration in hbase-default.xml.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I have double checked that the memory flush
>>>>>>>> very rarely happens on more than 1 regionserver at a time in fact
>> in
>>>> my
>>>>>>>> many hours of staring at tails of logs, it only happened once where
>>>> two
>>>>>>>> regionservers flushed at the same time.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> You've enabled DEBUG?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> My investigations point strongly towards a coding problem on our
>> side
>>>>>>>> rather
>>>>>>>> than a problem with the server setup or hBase itself.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> If things were slow from client-perspective, that might be a
>>>> client-side
>>>>>>> coding problem but these pauses, unless you have a fly-by deadlock in
>>>> your
>>>>>>> client-code, its probably an hbase issue.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I say this because
>>>>>>>> whilst I understand why a regionserver would go offline during a
>>>> memory
>>>>>>>> flush, I would expect the other two regionservers to pick up the
>> load
>>>>
>>>>>>>> especially since the built-in hbase shell has no problem accessing
>>>> hBase
>>>>>>>> whilst a regionserver is busy doing a memstore flush.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> HBase does not go offline during memory flush. It continues to be
>>>>>>> available for reads and writes during this time. And see J-D
>> response
>>>> for
>>>>>>> incorrect understanding of how loading of regions is done in an hbase
>>>>>>> cluster.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> ...
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I think either I am leaving out code that is required to determine
>>>> which
>>>>>>>> RegionServers are available OR I am keeping too many hBase objects
>> in
>>>> RAM
>>>>>>>> instead of calling their constructors each time (my purpose
>> obviously
>>>> was
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> improve performance).
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> For sure keep single instance of HBaseConfiguration at least and use
>>>> this
>>>>>>> constructing all HTable and HBaseAdmin instances.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Currently the live system is inserting over 7 Million records per
>> day
>>>>>>>> (mostly between 8AM and 10PM) which is not a ridiculously high load.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> What size are the records? What is your table schema? How many
>>>> regions do
>>>>>>> you currently have in your table?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> St.Ack
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
