[HADOOP-8608] Add Configuration API for parsing time durations

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.1.0-beta
• Fix Version/s: 2.1.0-beta
• Component/s: conf
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Assignee: Christopher Douglas
• Reporter: Todd Lipcon
• Created: 19/Jul/12 00:58
• Updated: 23/Feb/16 23:49
• Resolved: 30/Apr/13 22:16

Description

Hadoop has a lot of configurations which specify durations or intervals of time. Unfortunately these different configurations have little consistency in units - eg some are in milliseconds, some in seconds, and some in minutes. This makes it difficult for users to configure, since they have to always refer back to docs to remember the unit for each property.

The proposed solution is to add an API like Configuration.getTimeDuration which allows the user to specify the units with a postfix. For example, "10ms", "10s", "10m", "10h", or even "10d". For backwards-compatibility, if the user does not specify a unit, the API can specify the default unit, and warn the user that they should specify an explicit unit instead.

Issue Links

• is duplicated by: HADOOP-6287 Support units for configuration knobs
• is duplicated by: HADOOP-10381 Support unit suffix in the configuration values
• is related to: HBASE-6990 Pretty print TTL
• relates to: HDFS-9821 HDFS configuration should accept friendly time units
• relates to: HADOOP-6287 Support units for configuration knobs