Configuration Parameters: What can you just ignore

Configuring a Hadoop cluster is something akin to voodoo. There are a large number of variables in hadoop-default.xml that you can override in hadoop-site.xml. Some specify file paths on your system, but others adjust levers and knobs deep inside Hadoop’s guts. Unfortuately, there’s little or no documentation on how to set them well. Is there a single optimal configuration? Are there some settings that can just be “set to 11?”

At Cloudera, we’re working hard to make Hadoop easier to use and to make configuration less painful. Our Hadoop Configuration Tool gives you a web-based guide to help set up your cluster. Once it’s running, though, you might want to look under the hood and tune things a bit.

The rest of this post discusses why it’s a bad idea to just set all the limits as high as they’ll go, and gives you some pointers to get started on finding a happy medium.

Why can’t you just set all the limits to 1,000,000?

Increasing most settings has a direct impact on memory consumption. Increasing DataNode and TaskTracker settings, therefore, has an adverse impact on RAM available to individual MapReduce tasks. On large hardware, they can be set generously high. In general though, unless you have several dozen more more nodes working together, dialing up settings very high wastes system resources like RAM that could be better applied to running your mapper and reducer code.

That having been said, here’s a list of some things that can be cranked up higher than the defaults by a fair margin:

File descriptor limits

A busy Hadoop daemon might need to open a lot of files. The open fd ulimit in Linux defaults to 1024, which might be too low. You can set to something more generous — maybe 16384. Setting this an order of magnitude higher (e.g., 128K) is probably not a good idea. No individual Hadoop daemon is supposed to need hundreds of thousands of fds; if it’s consuming that many, then there’s probably an fd leak or other bug that needs fixing. This would just mask the true problem until errors started showing up somewhere else.

You can view your ulimits in bash by running:

1	$ ulimit - a

To set the fd ulimit for a process, you’ll need to be root. As root, open a shell, and run:

1	# ulimit -n 16384

You can then run the Hadoop daemon from that shell; the ulimits will be inherited. e.g.:

1	# sudo -u hadoop $HADOOP_HOME/bin/hadoop-daemon.sh start namenode

You can also set the ulimit for the hadoop user in /etc/security/limits.conf; this mechanism will set the value persistently. Make sure pam_limits is enabled for whatever auth mechanism the hadoop daemon is using. The entry will look something like:

1	hadoop hard nofile 16384

If you’re running our distribution, we ship a modified version of Hadoop 0.18.3 that includes HADOOP-4346, a fix for the “soft fd leak” that has affected Hadoop since 0.17, so this should be less critical for our users. Users of the official Apache Hadoop release are affected by the fd leak for all 0.17, 0.18, and 0.19 versions. (The fix is committed for 0.20.) For the curious, we’ve published a list of all differences between our release of Hadoop and the stock 0.18.3 release.

If you’re running Linux 2.6.27, you should also set the epoll limit to something generous; maybe 4096 or 8192.

1	# echo 4096 > /proc/sys/fs/epoll/max_user_instances

Then put the following text in /etc/sysctl.conf:

1	fs . epoll . max_user_instances = 4096

See http://pero.blogs.aprilmayjune.org/2009/01/22/hadoop-and-linux-kernel-2627-epoll-limits/ for more details.

Internal settings

If there is more RAM available than is consumed by task instances, set io.sort.factor to 25 or 32 (up from 10).io.sort.mb should be 10 * io.sort.factor. Don’t forget, multiply io.sort.mb by the number of concurrent tasks to determine how much RAM you’re actually allocating here, to prevent swapping. (So 10 task instances with io.sort.mb= 320 means you’re actually allocating 3.2 GB of RAM for sorting, up from 1.0 GB.) An open ticket on the Hadoop bug tracking database suggests making the default value here 100. This would likely result in a lower per-stream cache size than 10 MB.

io.file.buffer.size – this is one of the more “magic” parameters. You can set this to 65536 and leave it there. (I’ve profiled this in a bunch of scenarios; this seems to be the sweet spot.)

If the NameNode and JobTracker are on big hardware, set dfs.namenode.handler.count to 64 and same withmapred.job.tracker.handler.count. If you’ve got more than 64 GB of RAM in this machine, you can double it again.

dfs.datanode.handler.count defaults to 3 and could be set a bit higher. (Maybe 8 or 10.) More than this takes up memory that could be devoted to running MapReduce tasks, and I don’t know that it gives you any more performance. (An increased number of HDFS clients implies an increased number of DataNodes to handle the load.)

mapred.child.ulimit should be 2–3x higher than the heap size specified in mapred.child.java.opts and left there to prevent runaway child task memory consumption.

Setting tasktracker.http.threads higher than 40 will deprive individual tasks of RAM, and won’t see a positive impact on shuffle performance until your cluster is approaching 100 nodes or more.

Conclusions

Configuring Hadoop for “optimal performance” is a moving target, and depends heavily on your own applications. There are settings that need to be moved off their defaults, but finding the best value for each is difficult. Our configurator for Hadoop will do a reasonable job of getting you started.

We’d love to hear from you about your own configurations. Did you discover a combination of settings that really made your cluster sing? Please share in the comments.

The photo of Nigel’s amplifier is from the movie This is Spinal Tap, distributed by Embassy Pictures.

Reference: http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2009/03/configuration-parameters-what-can-you-just-ignore/