Why Data in the Buffer Is Lost If a Power Outage Occurs During Storage of Small Files

Question

Why data in the buffer is lost if a power outage occurs during storage of small files?

Answer

Because of a power outage, the blocks in the buffer are not written to the disk immediately after the write operation is completed. To enable synchronization of blocks to the disk, set dfs.datanode.synconclose to true in the hdfs-site.xml file.

By default, dfs.datanode.synconclose is set to false. This improves the performance but can cause a buffer data loss in the case of a power outage, and therefore, it is recommended that dfs.datanode.synconclose be set to true even if this may affect the performance. You can determine whether to enable the synchronization function based on your actual situation.