Hypertable Routs HBase in Performance Test -- HBase Overwhelmed by Garbage Collection
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 9:30AM 
Hypertable delivers 2X better throughput in most tests -- HBase fails 41 and 167 billion record insert tests, overwhelmed by garbage collection -- Both systems deliver similar results for random read uniform test
We recently conducted a test comparing the performance of Hypertable (@hypertable) version 0.9.5.5 to that of HBase (@HBase) version 0.90.4 (CDH3u2) running Zookeeper 3.3.4. In this post, we summarize the results and offer explanations for the discrepancies. For the full test report, see Hypertable vs. HBase II.
Introduction
Hypertable and HBase are both open source, scalable databases modeled after Google's proprietary Bigtable database. The primary difference between the two systems is that Hypertable is written in C++, while HBase is written in Java. We modeled this test after the one described in section 7 of the Bigtable paper and tuned both systems for maximum performance. The test was run on a total of sixteen machines connected together with gigabit Ethernet. The machines had the following configuration:
