Hi Tendai,

I do not understand the concept of row contention. Is not this config row just the row that is retrieved most often on the region servers that contain it and are not other rows on these servers served equally slow?

HBase tends to compact tables to a limited number of large size regions (typically 20GB). So, if you have an hdfs replication factor of 3 and your graph has a size of just two regions, at best 6 region servers of your HBase cluster can serve your 500 spark executors.

So, maybe this gives you some hint on what is happening. Or maybe you have more details on how you came to the conclusion that there is such a thing as row contention?

Best wishes,    Marc