Block Replication Limits in HDFS

Question

I'm currently rebuilding our servers that have our region-servers and data nodes. When I take down a data node, after 10 minutes the blocks that it had are being re-replicated among other data nodes, as it should. We have 10 data-nodes, so I see heavy network traffic as the blocks are being re-replicated. However, I'm seeing that traffic to be about only 500-600mbps per server (the machines all have gigabit interfaces) so it's definitely not network-bound. I'm trying to figure out what is limiting the speed that the data-nodes send and receive blocks. Each data-node has six 7200 rpm sata drives, and the IO usage is very low during this, only peaking to 20-30% per drive. Is there a limit built into hdfs that limits the speed at which blocks are replicated?

Answer 1

The rate of replication work is throttled by HDFS to not interfere with cluster traffic when failures happen during regular cluster load.

The properties that control this are dfs.namenode.replication.work.multiplier.per.iteration (2), dfs.namenode.replication.max-streams (2) and dfs.namenode.replication.max-streams-hard-limit (4). The foremost controls the rate of work to be scheduled to a DN at every heartbeat that occurs, and the other two further limit the maximum parallel threaded network transfers done by a DataNode at a time. The values in () indicate their defaults. Some description of this is available at https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-hdfs/hdfs-default.xml

You can perhaps try to increase the set of values to (10, 50, 100) respectively to spruce up the network usage (requires a NameNode restart), but note that your DN memory usage may increase slightly as a result of more blocks information being propagated to it. A reasonable heap size for these values for the DN role would be about 4 GB.

P.s. These values were not tried by me on production systems personally. You will also not want to max out the re-replication workload such that it affects regular cluster work, as recovery of 1/3 replicas may be of lesser priority than missing job/query SLAs due to lack of network resources (unless you have a really fast network that's always under-utilised even under loaded periods). Try to tune it till you're satisfied with the results.