Details
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Bug
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Status: Closed
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Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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0.10.1
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None
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None
Description
The datanode sends a heartbeat to the namenode every 3 seconds. The namenode processes the heartbeat and sends a list of block-to-be-replicated and blocks-to-be-deleted as part of the heartbeat response.
At times when a couple of datanodes fail, the heartbeat processing on the namenode becomes pretty heavyweight. It acquires the global FSNamesystem lock, traverses the neededReplication structure, generates a list of blocks to be replicated and responds to the heartbeat message. Determining the list of blocks-to-be-replciated is pretty heavyweight, takes plenty of CPU and blocks processing of other heartbeats because of the global FSNamesystem lock.
It would improve scalability a lot if heartbeat processing does not require the FSNamesystem lock. In fact, the pre-existing "heartbeat" lock already exists for this purpose.
I propose that the Heartbeat message be separate from the "retrieve blocks-to-replicate and blocks-to-delete" messages. The datanode can continue to heartbeat once every 3 seconds while it can afford to "retrieve blocks-to-replicate" at a much coarser interval. Heartbeat processing on the namenode will be fast because it does not require the global FSNamesystem lock. Moreover, a datanode failure will not aggrevate the heartbeat processing time on the namenode.