35.1. Hotspotting
Rows in HBase are sorted lexicographically by row key. This design optimizes for scans, allowing you to store related rows, or rows that will be read together, near each other. However, poorly designed row keys are a common source of hotspotting. Hotspotting occurs when a large amount of client traffic is directed at one node, or only a few nodes, of a cluster. This traffic may represent reads, writes, or other operations. The traffic overwhelms the single machine responsible for hosting that region, causing performance degradation and potentially leading to region unavailability. This can also have adverse effects on other regions hosted by the same region server as that host is unable to service the requested load. It is important to design data access patterns such that the cluster is fully and evenly utilized.
To prevent hotspotting on writes, design your row keys such that rows that truly do need to be in the same region are, but in the bigger picture, data is being written to multiple regions across the cluster, rather than one at a time. Some common techniques for avoiding hotspotting are described below, along with some of their advantages and drawbacks.
Salting in this sense has nothing to do with cryptography, but refers to adding random data to the start of a row key. In this case, salting refers to adding a randomly-assigned prefix to the row key to cause it to sort differently than it otherwise would. The number of possible prefixes correspond to the number of regions you want to spread the data across. Salting can be helpful if you have a few "hot" row key patterns which come up over and over amongst other more evenly-distributed rows. Consider the following example, which shows that salting can spread write load across multiple RegionServers, and illustrates some of the negative implications for reads.
Suppose you have the following list of row keys, and your table is split such that there is one region for each letter of the alphabet. Prefix 'a' is one region, prefix 'b' is another. In this table, all rows starting with 'f' are in the same region. This example focuses on rows with keys like the following:
foo0001 foo0002 foo0003 foo0004
Now, imagine that you would like to spread these across four different regions. You decide to use four different salts: a
, b
, c
, and d
. In this scenario, each of these letter prefixes will be on a different region. After applying the salts, you have the following rowkeys instead. Since you can now write to four separate regions, you theoretically have four times the throughput when writing that you would have if all the writes were going to the same region.
a-foo0003 b-foo0001 c-foo0004 d-foo0002
Then, if you add another row, it will randomly be assigned one of the four possible salt values and end up near one of the existing rows.
a-foo0003 b-foo0001 c-foo0003 c-foo0004 d-foo0002
Since this assignment will be random, you will need to do more work if you want to retrieve the rows in lexicographic order. In this way, salting attempts to increase throughput on writes, but has a cost during reads.
Instead of a random assignment, you could use a one-way hash that would cause a given row to always be "salted" with the same prefix, in a way that would spread the load across the RegionServers, but allow for predictability during reads. Using a deterministic hash allows the client to reconstruct the complete rowkey and use a Get operation to retrieve that row as normal.
foo0003
to always, and predictably, receive the
a
prefix. Then, to retrieve that row, you would already know the key. You could also optimize things so that certain pairs of keys were always in the same region, for instance.
A third common trick for preventing hotspotting is to reverse a fixed-width or numeric row key so that the part that changes the most often (the least significant digit) is first. This effectively randomizes row keys, but sacrifices row ordering properties.
See https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/datastack/blog/2013/11/10/discussion-on-designing-hbase-tables, and article on Salted Tables from the Phoenix project, and the discussion in the comments ofHBASE-11682 for more information about avoiding hotspotting.