I ran into the same problem. Looking at the DataTracker logs, I noticed there was not enough free space for the single reducer to run on any of my nodes:
2013-09-15 16:55:19,385 WARN org.apache.hadoop.mapred.JobInProgress: No room for reduce task. Node tracker_slave01.mydomain.com:localhost/127.0.0.1:43455 has 503,777,017,856 bytes free; but we expect reduce input to take 978136413988
This 503gb refers to the free space available on one of the hard drives on the particular slave ("tracker_slave01.mydomain.com"), thus the reducer apparently needs to copy all the data to a single drive.
The reason this happens is your table only has one region when it is brand new. As data is inserted into that region, it'll eventually split on its own.
A solution to this is to pre-create your regions when creating your table. The Bulk Loading Chapter in the HBase book discusses this, and presents two options for doing this. This can also be done via the HBase shell (see create
's SPLITS
argument I think). The challenge though is defining your splits such that the regions get an even distribution of keys. I've yet to solve this problem perfectly, but here's what I'm doing currently:
HTableDescriptor desc = new HTableDescriptor();
desc.setName(Bytes.toBytes(tableName));
desc.addFamily(new HColumnDescriptor("my_col_fam"));
admin.createTable(desc, Bytes.toBytes(0), Bytes.toBytes(2147483647), 100);
An alternative solution would be to not use configureIncrementalLoad
, and instead: 1) just generate your HFile's via MapReduce w/ no reducers; 2) use completebulkload
feature in hbase.jar to import your records to HBase. Of course, I think this runs into the same problem with regions, so you'll want to create the regions ahead of time too (I think).