Measuring the performance of a HBase cluster, or benchmarking the cluster, is as important as tuning the cluster itself. The performance characteristics of a HBase cluster that we should measure include at least the following:
Overall throughput (operations per second) of the cluster
Average latency (average time per operation) of the cluster
Minimum latency
Maximum latency
Distribution of operation latencies
YCSB is a great tool to benchmark performance of HBase clusters. YCSB supports running variable load tests in parallel, to evaluate the insert, update, delete, and read performance of the system. Therefore, you can use YCSB to benchmark for both write-heavy and read-heavy HBase clusters. The record count to load, operations to perform, proportion of read and write, and many other properties are configurable for each test, so it is easy to use YCSB to test different load scenarios of the cluster.
YCSB can also be used to evaluate the performance of many...