Tuning HBase

In this recipe, we will look at HBase tuning and some things to keep in mind. This is not an exclusive list of things to do, but it is a good starting point.

You are recommended to read through Chapter 8, Performance Tuning, before going through the tuning aspects of HBase cluster. It will give you a better insight into tuning the operating system, network, disk, and so on.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have completed the Setting up multi-node HBase cluster recipe for this section and understand the basic Linux commands.

How to do it...

1. Connect to the master1.cyrus.com master node and switch to the user hadoop.
2. Edit the hbase-env.sh file and add the following lines to it to tune the heap as per the work load:

   export HBASE_HEAPSIZE=1G
   export HBASE_OFFHEAPSIZE=1G
   

3. We can tune the Java GC algorithm. The default is marked sweep and if the GC times is high, this should be changed to Parallel GC:

   export HBASE_OPTS="-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC"
   

4. If we are using Java 8, then the PermSize...