HBase Major Compaction

Major compaction merges and rewrites all the HFiles in a region to one HFile per column family, and in the process, drops deleted or expired cells. This improves read performance; however, since major compaction rewrites all of the files, lots of disk I/O and network traffic might occur during the process. This is called write amplification.

Major compactions can be scheduled to run automatically. Due to write amplification, major compactions are usually scheduled for weekends or evenings. Note that MapR-DB has made improvements and does not need to do compactions. A major compaction also makes any data files that were remote, due to server failure or load balancing, local to the region server.