[HBASE-420] Adjacent small regions should be automatically merged

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Not A Problem
• Component/s: master, regionserver
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Bryan Duxbury
• Created: 06/Feb/08 23:41
• Updated: 11/Jun/22 20:08
• Resolved: 08/Jun/14 21:51

Description

Region merge functionality exists in HBase today, but merges are triggered manually (in theory only, because there is no admin tool for doing so). Instead of relying on an admin to note and merge regions, the Master should detect adjacent undersized regions and automatically merge them.

Other than the case when a table has exactly one region, region sizes should always be between 1/2x and 1x the split size. For instance, if the max file size is 256MB, steady-state, regions will be between 128 and 256MB. If we find two regions near each other that are less than some threshold when summed together, they are candidates for merging. For instance, we could set the threshold to 1/2x max file size, so if one region was 50MB and the other was 16MB, they would be mergeable.

The only time that regions small enough to merge should exist is when there have been significant deletions. Otherwise, regions will always stay in the 1/2 to 1x range.

Issue Links

• is duplicated by: HBASE-628 automatic merging-up of too small regions