Monthly Archives: December 2008

Graceful shutdown, Hadoop, and black magic

Recently, while working on the Collector, I noticed that we had an issue with graceful shutdown of our servers. The Collector uses a JVM shutdown hook to catch the SIGTERM and take some cleanup actions before allowing the exit to go on. However, every time I would try to gracefully shut down a server, I’d [...]

Posted in Hadoop | 2 Comments

Rapleaf Challenge Problem

We’ve created a challenge problem based on one of the core problems we’ve had to solve in our MapReduce workflow. A word of warning – this isn’t one of those toy problems other companies put out on their careers page. This one is so hard it will make you cry. Rapleaf Challenge Problem

Posted in Hadoop, Miscellaneous | 12 Comments

Rent or Own: Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation Comparison for Hadoop Clusters

For some time now, Rapleaf has been hard at work converting a critical portion of our infrastructure from a MySQL-based system to a Hadoop-based one. We see it as a much more obvious path to linear scalability of our processing pipeline. Since scalability is our goal, a technology that has obviously found its way into [...]

Posted in Hadoop | 27 Comments
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