Yi Liu created HDFS-9053:
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             Summary: Support large directories efficiently using B-Tree
                 Key: HDFS-9053
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-9053
             Project: Hadoop HDFS
          Issue Type: Improvement
          Components: namenode
            Reporter: Yi Liu
            Assignee: Yi Liu


This is a long standing issue, we were trying to improve this in the past.  
Currently we use an ArrayList for the children under a directory, and the 
children are ordered in the list, for insert/delete/search, the time complexity 
is O(log n), but insertion/deleting causes re-allocations and copies of big 
arrays, so the operations are costly.  For example, if the children grow to 1M 
size, the ArrayList will resize to > 1M capacity, so need > 1M * 4bytes = 4M 
continuous heap memory, it easily causes full GC in HDFS cluster where namenode 
heap memory is already highly used.  I recap the 3 main issues:
# Insertion/deletion operations in large directories are expensive because 
re-allocations and copies of big arrays.
# Dynamically allocate several MB continuous heap memory which will be 
long-lived can easily cause full GC problem.
# Even most children are removed later, but the directory INode still occupies 
same size heap memory, since the ArrayList will never shrink.

This JIRA is similar to HDFS-7174 created by [~kihwal], but use B-Tree to solve 
the problem suggested by [~shv]. 
So the target of this JIRA is to implement a low memory footprint B-Tree and 
use it to replace ArrayList. 
If the elements size is not large (less than the maximum degree of B-Tree 
node), the B-Tree only has one root node which contains an array for the 
elements. And if the size grows large enough, it will split automatically, and 
if elements are removed, then B-Tree nodes can merge automatically (see more: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-tree).  It will solve the above 3 issues.



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