An Empirical Performance Analysis on Hadoop via Optimizing the Network Heartbeat Period

To support a large-scale Hadoop cluster, Hadoop heartbeat messages are designed to deliver the significant messages, including task scheduling and completion messages, via piggybacking to reduce the number of messages received by the NameNode. Although Hadoop is designed and optimized for high-throughput computing via batch processing, the real-time processing of large amounts of data in Hadoop is increasingly important. This paper evaluates Hadoop's performance and costs when the heartbeat period is controlled to support latency sensitive applications. Through an empirical study based on Hadoop 2.0 (YARN) architecture, we improve Hadoop's I/O performance as well as application performance by up to 13 percent compared to the default configuration. We offer a guideline that predicts the performance, costs and limitations of the total system by controlling the heartbeat period using simple equations. We show that Hive performance can be improved by tuning Hadoop's heartbeat periods through extensive experiments.