The following step below should help you: take a phyciscal backup of the master you are going to take down (in case something is going wrong with the migration). stop doing any DDL to the masters to prevent data loss.  take down the master you chosen on step 1. follow the doc Recovering from a Dead Kudu Master in a Multi-Master Deployment. ... View more

When you said you were using 'new Date()', is it java.util.Date? If so, can you try 'SimpleDateFormat' where you can set time zone by 'setTimeZone', example can be found here.    I also notice the Impala doc stating that 'The conversion between the Impala 96-bit representation and the Kudu 64-bit representation introduces some performance overhead when reading or writing TIMESTAMP columns. You can minimize the overhead during writes by performing inserts through the Kudu API. Because the overhead during reads applies to each query, you might continue to use a BIGINT column to represent date/time values in performance-critical applications.' So I guess that is why you are seeing insert performance difference. And if you care about query performance as well, the other option is to use 'BIGINT' column.   ... View more