Major Description
In testing, we have observed that if a client caches some regions with replicas in MetaCache, and then the table is recreated, the cache does not get invalidated. Upon caching more entries from a new instance of the table we can have entries for replicas from different instances of a table (remember that metacache is row based)
On async wal replay (HBASE-11568), we have an elaborate mechanism to track region replica locations and skip replaying wal entries if the current region replica is not the same region replica from the original wal edit. This prevents replaying entries of older tables with the same name to the region replicas as well as replaying older entries from split (or merged) regions from old parent to new daughters.
Trace level logging in my test setup showed that we were skipping some entries because of a case, where we would have region locations (of the same range) cached from different instances of the table (meaning some replicas are from already deleted table vs some entries from new table). This was causing superfluous skipping entries.
The fix can be when we are merging entries for the same range, we simply check the other entries and delete those that do not match the new region id.