Region servers frequently failing wit NullPointerException

[#1]

I am running a cluster with HDP 2.4.2 and HBase 1.1.2. I frequently (about once a day) have region server failure, and sometimes this involves a number of servers failing. I have looked in the logs, and a common cause of failure is the following error:

java.lang.NullPointerException
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegion.getOldestHfileTs(HRegion.java:1633)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer.createRegionLoad(HRegionServer.java:1465)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer.buildServerLoad(HRegionServer.java:1189)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer.tryRegionServerReport(HRegionServer.java:1132)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.regionserver.HRegionServer.run(HRegionServer.java:949)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

This seems to be related to the following JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-14798. This does provide a patch as far back as 1.1.4, but since we're using 1.1.2 the patch does not apply to my version. Does anybody know how I can avoid or fix this problem on this version of HBase? Thanks in advance.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Please consider upgrading to HDP-2.4.3. This issue was fixed in that release (as well as HDP-2.3.6).

[#3]

Thanks for the info. I've spoken to my manager, we're going to upgrade to 2.4.3