Chapter 2. An Overview of the Hadoop Parameters

Once you have your Hadoop job running, it is important to know whether your cluster resources are being fully utilized. Fortunately, the Hadoop framework provides several parameters that enable you to tune your job and specify how it will run on the cluster.

Performance tuning involves four main components: CPU utilization, memory occupation, disk I/O, and network traffic. This chapter describes the most relative parameters to these components and introduces techniques to optimize Hadoop execution and define some configuration parameters.

It is important and essential to have an efficient monitoring tool, with alerts delivered when a problem is developing or occurs, which provides a visual indication of how the Hadoop cluster is and has been performing. This chapter is focused on introducing Hadoop performance tuning using configuration parameters and also introducing several tools for monitoring Hadoop services.

In this chapter, we will cover...

Investigating the Hadoop parameters

As discussed in Chapter 1, Understanding MapReduce, there are many factors that may affect the Hadoop MapReduce performance. In general, workload-dependent Hadoop performance optimization efforts have to focus on three major categories: the system hardware, the system software, and the configuration and tuning/optimization of the Hadoop infrastructure components.

It is good to point out that Hadoop is classified as a highly-scalable solution, but not necessarily as a high-performance cluster solution. Administrators can configure and tune a Hadoop cluster with various configuration options. Performance configuration parameters focus mainly on CPU utilization, memory occupation, disk I/O, and network traffic. Besides the main performance parameters of Hadoop, other system parameters such as inter-rack bandwidth may affect the overall performance of the cluster.

Hadoop can be configured and customized according to the user's needs; the configuration files...

Hadoop MapReduce metrics

Due to its scale and distributed nature, diagnosing the performance problems of Hadoop programs and monitoring a Hadoop system are inherently difficult. Although Hadoop system exports many textual metrics and logs, this information may be difficult to interpret and not fully understood by many application programmers.

Currently, Hadoop reports coarse-grained metrics about the performance of the whole system through logs and metrics API. Unfortunately, it lacks important metrics for per-job/per-task levels such as disk and network I/O utilization. In the case of running multiple jobs in a Hadoop system, it also lacks metrics to reflect the cluster resource utilization of each task. This results in difficulty for cluster administrators to measure their cluster utilization and set up the correct configuration of Hadoop systems.

Furthermore, logs generated by Hadoop can get excessively large, which makes it extremely difficult to handle them manually and can hardly answer...

Performance monitoring tools

Monitoring basic system resources on Hadoop cluster nodes such as CPU utilization and average disk data transfer rates helps to understand the overall utilization of these hardware resources and identify any bottlenecks while diagnosing performance issues. Monitoring a Hadoop cluster includes monitoring the usage of system resources on cluster nodes along with monitoring the key service metrics. The most commonly monitored resources are I/O bandwidth, number of disk I/O operations per second, average data transfer rate, network latency, and average memory and swap space utilization.

Hadoop performance monitoring suggests collecting performance counters' data in order to determine whether the response times of various tasks lie within acceptable execution time range. The average percentage utilization for MapReduce tasks and HDFS storage capacity over time indicates whether your cluster's resources are used optimally or are underused.

Hadoop offers a substantial...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed Hadoop MapReduce performance tuning and learned how application developers and cluster administrators can tune Hadoop in order to enhance the MapReduce job's performance.

We learned about most configuration variables related to CPU, disk I/O, memory and network utilization and discussed how these variables may affect the MapReduce job's performance.

Then, we learned about Hadoop metrics and suggested some open source monitoring tools, which enhance the Hadoop monitoring experience and are very handy to Hadoop cluster administrators and application developers.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to identify resource bottlenecks based on performance indicators and also learn about common performance tuning methods.