Peter Coates discusses cluster rebalancing in Hadoop:
After adding new racks to our 70 node cluster, we noticed that it was taking several hours per terabyte to rebalance the nodes. You can copy a terabyte of data across a 10GbE network in under half an hour with SCP, so why should HDFS take several hours?
It didn’t take long to discover the cause—the configuration parameterdfs.datanode.balance.bandwidthPerSecond controls how much bandwidth each node is allowed to use for rebalancing, and it defaults to a conservative value of 10Mb/sec/node, which is 1.25MB/sec. If you have 70 nodes (the number we started with before adding new ones), that’s 87.5MB/second. One terabyte, i.e., a million MB, divided 87.5MB/sec, equals 11,428 sec, or 3.17 hours per TB. The more nodes in the original cluster, the faster it will write.
On the development side, “it’ll automatically rebalance without us having to worry” is a great thing. On the administrative side, we’re paid to worry about these things…