Major Description
A NameNode at one of our clusters fell into full GC while fsck was performed. Digging into the problem shows that it is caused by how NameNode handles the access time of a file.
Fsck calls open on every file in the checked directory to get the file's block locations. Each open changes the file's access time and then leads to writing a transaction entry to the edit log. The current code optimizes open so that it returns without issuing synchronizing the edit log to the disk. It happened that in our cluster no other jobs were running while fsck was performed. No edit log sync was ever called. So all open transactions were kept in memory. When the edit log buffer got full, it automatically doubled its space by allocating a new buffer. Full GC happened when no contiguous space were found when allocating a new bigger buffer.