How to set time limit for creating HBase connection

Question

I'm currently using HBase v0.98.6. I would like to check the current connection status from an external Java program. Right now, I'm doing something like this to check:

connectionSuccess = true;
try {
     HConnection hConnection = createConnection(config);
} catch (Exception ex) {
     connectionSuccess = false;
}

When the connection is working, this returns fairly quickly. The problem is when the connection is not working, and it takes 20 minutes for it to finally return connectionSuccess=false. Is there a way to reduce this time limit, as I'm just interested in getting the connection status at the current time?

Answer 1

The reason it takes so long is that by default if the connection fails it will retry multiple times (I think 6? don't quote me), and each connection attempt takes a while. Try a combination of these commands to limit time per connection before timeout, and number of permitted retry attempts.

hbase.client.retries.number = 3
hbase.client.pause = 1000
zookeeper.recovery.retry = 1 (i.e. no retry)

Credit to Lars from http://hadoop-hbase.blogspot.com/2012/09/hbase-client-timeouts.html