2. 10,000 Concurrent requests per second

3. Super fast!

4. Super Huge datastore – 2bl rows.

5. Backend is scalable

6. Does not lose data

7. Why? – HBASE is used for 99% of the backend

9. ImageShack: 25 ml monthly uniques

10. Yfrog: 33 ml monthly uniques

11. 4 Hbase Clusters of various sizes (50TB to 1 PT)

12. Storing and serving 250ml photos (500kb average per file), 60 servers

13. Yfrog is powered by smaller 50 TB cluster, with 2 billion rows, 20 servers

14. Using 0.89x and 0.90x versions

16. Lots of RAM is good but only to a point, just avoid swap.

17. We use sub $1k desktop grade servers, they work great!

18. Check your network hardware for packet drops (we had outifDiscards interrupting zookeeper messages, Region servers would suicide during packet loss), just use ping -f to test for packet loss between core nodes.

19. JVM GC does take lots of CPU when misconfigured – e.g. Small NewSize

20. Single Namenode? No problem, just build two clusters have your APP tier do log query replication and replays when needed.

21. Inexpensive 2TB hitachi disks (~$100) work great, get more units for your money.

23. 2. Setup HDFS to work flawlessly (pay attention to ulimits, thread limits, hardware stats, graphs, iowait, etc)

24. 3. Adjust JVM GC NewSize to be at least 100MB (if YG GC is too slow for 100MB, you need faster CPUs).

25. 4. For metadata rows (small rows) adjust your Hbase block size to be 4 or 8kb, you will see less IO and more blocks will fit into RAM.

28. Memstore size graph should be fairly flat with even flushes over time.

29. Iowait graphs should not go over 70-80% during major compaction, and 20% during minor compactions. Otherwise just add more disks and/or nodes.

30. Monitor and graph Thrift threads (via ps -eLf | grep PID), if your threads end up over 25,000, you may run out of RAM. We have dedicated thrift boxes so that we don't accidently kill RS nodes.

31. We use Nagios to monitor and alert for DN, RS, ZK, NN, etc on their web tcp ports – very helpful.

32. Run hbck to check for consistency of meta structures.

34. Various RAM brands – boxes crash for no reason.

35. Glibc in FC13 had race condition bug, would lock up nodes, crash JVM processes under high load. Solution: yum -y update glibc (invalid binfree)

36. When running in mixed hardware environment, some boxes were slow enough to affect HDFS for the whole cluster – looking at “runnable threads” and “fsreadlatency” in Ganglia always pointed which boxes were 'slow'

37. Running cloudera HDFS under user 'hadoop', that was restricted to 1024 threads by default would crash datanodes, but only during compactions. Setting hadoop soft(and hard) nproc 32,000 in limits.conf resolved it.

38. GC sometimes autotunes NewSize of 20MB, caused GC run to 20 or 30 per second, causing CPU to flatline at 100% and kill the RS. Manually setting to 128MB resolved this issue.

40. No strange crashes

41. No OOME

42. Fast – 0.5 ms puts, 2-3ms reads, 10ms disk reads.

43. Recovers quickly when nodes are taken down

44. Oncall team can finally relax

46. Load test HBASE with YCSB – just leave it running for a week, if nothing crashes, you are good. Best not to test with live user traffic :)

47. Do not worry about Namenode redundancy, just backup /name dir frequently. Setup secondary Hbase cluster with the money you save on not buying 'Server' grade nodes.

48. Burn in your disks, even if they are new

49. Put Memcached between your App. Tier and Hbase, App. Bugs will hit memcached first, keeping hbase safe from the assault, which could drive your utilization.

51. JD Cryans

52. Michael Stack

53. And everyone else on the hbase user list who helped us out during the rough times.