Details
Critical Description
When storefiles need to be split as part of a region split, the current logic uses a threadpool with the size set to the size of the number of stores. Since most common table setup involves only a single column family, this translates to having a single store and so the threadpool is run with a single thread. However, in a write heavy workload, there could be several tens of storefiles in a store at the time of splitting, and with a threadpool size of one, these files end up getting split sequentially.
With a bit of tracing, I noticed that it takes on an average of 350ms to create a single reference file, and splitting each storefile involves creating two of these, so with a storefile count of 20, it takes about 14s just to get through this phase alone (2 reference files for each storefile), pushing the total time the region is offline to 18s or more. For environments that are setup to fail fast, this makes the client exhaust all retries and fail with NotServingRegionException.
The fix should increase the concurrency of this operation.
