No, the rebalancer doesn't fix leader skew. It may in a future release. Leaders can cluster onto one tserver when individual tservers are restarted; if you restart the entire cluster all at once you might be able to redistribute leadership more evenly. You're right that if you're only using one host to initiate reads, the reads will go to the local tserver rather than round-robin across the cluster. The master doesn't directly tell where clients to scan; it just provides them with enough information to make that decision based on their replica selection policy. There's also no way to do round robin (or randomized) replica selection. ... View more

Indeed, there's going to be a significant amount of memory consumed just as overhead to support that number of tablets. So you should either reduce the number of tablets per tserver, or increase the amount of RAM available to Kudu on those heavily-loaded machines. ... View more