@Pedro Gandola splitting occurs when your regions grow to the max size (hbase.hregion.max.filesize) as defined in your hbase-site.xml http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#disable.splitting when you run major compaction, the data locality is restored. Run major compactions on a busy system in off-peak hours. balancer distributes regions across the cluster, runs every 5 minutes by default, do not turn it off. You can implement your own balancer and replace the default StochasticLoadBalancer class, not recommended unless you know what you're doing. Another option is to enable read replicas, so essentially you're duplicating data in a different region server. The secondary replicas are read-only and maximize your data availablity. All in all, it's more art than science and you need to experiment with many hbase properties to get an ultimate result.
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