The first time I heard replicas in HBase the following thought immediately came to my mind: To alleviate the load in read-heavy clusters, one could assign Region servers to be replicas of others so that the load is distributed and there is less pressure on the main RS.
Just 2 days ago a colleague quoted a paragraph from HBase manual that contradicted this completely. Apparently, the replicas do not help with the load but they actually contribute to more traffic on the network and on the underlying file system Would someone be able to give us some insight on why anyone would want replicas? And also could one easily change this behavior in the HBase native Java client to support what I had been imagining as the concept for replicas? thanks
