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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-985?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel
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Hairong Kuang updated HDFS-985:
-------------------------------

    Attachment: iterativeLS_trunk3.patch

Log4j change was not intended. This patch removes it.

> HDFS should issue multiple RPCs for listing a large directory
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HDFS-985
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-985
>             Project: Hadoop HDFS
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>            Reporter: Hairong Kuang
>            Assignee: Hairong Kuang
>             Fix For: 0.22.0
>
>         Attachments: directoryBrowse_0.20yahoo.patch, 
> directoryBrowse_0.20yahoo_1.patch, iterativeLS_trunk.patch, 
> iterativeLS_trunk1.patch, iterativeLS_trunk2.patch, iterativeLS_trunk3.patch, 
> iterativeLS_trunk3.patch, iterativeLS_yahoo.patch, iterativeLS_yahoo1.patch, 
> testFileStatus.patch
>
>
> Currently HDFS issues one RPC from the client to the NameNode for listing a 
> directory. However some directories are large that contain thousands or 
> millions of items. Listing such large directories in one RPC has a few 
> shortcomings:
> 1. The list operation holds the global fsnamesystem lock for a long time thus 
> blocking other requests. If a large number (like thousands) of such list 
> requests hit NameNode in a short period of time, NameNode will be 
> significantly slowed down. Users end up noticing longer response time or lost 
> connections to NameNode.
> 2. The response message is uncontrollable big. We observed a response as big 
> as 50M bytes when listing a directory of 300 thousand items. Even with the 
> optimization introduced at HDFS-946 that may be able to cut the response by 
> 20-50%, the response size will still in the magnitude of 10 mega bytes.
> I propose to implement a directory listing using multiple RPCs. Here is the 
> plan:
> 1. Each getListing RPC has an upper limit on the number of items returned.  
> This limit could be configurable, but I am thinking to set it to be a fixed 
> number like 500.
> 2. Each RPC additionally specifies a start position for this listing request. 
> I am thinking to use the last item of the previous listing RPC as an 
> indicator. Since NameNode stores all items in a directory as a sorted array, 
> NameNode uses the last item to locate the start item of this listing even if 
> the last item is deleted in between these two consecutive calls. This has the 
> advantage of avoid duplicate entries at the client side.
> 3. The return value additionally specifies if the whole directory is done 
> listing. If the client sees a false flag, it will continue to issue another 
> RPC.
> This proposal will change the semantics of large directory listing in a sense 
> that listing is no longer an atomic operation if a directory's content is 
> changing while the listing operation is in progress.

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