Hadoop's problem with small files—files that are significantly smaller than the HDFS block size—is well known. When dealing with small files as input, a Map task is created for each of these files introducing bookkeeping overheads. The same Map task is able to finish processing in a matter of a few seconds, a processing time much smaller than the time taken to spawn and cleanup the task. Each object in the NameNode occupies about 150 bytes of memory. Many small files will proliferate in the presence of these objects and adversely affect NameNode's performance and scalability. Reading a set of smaller files is also very inefficient because of the large number of disk seeks and hops across DataNodes to fetch them.

Unfortunately, small files are a reality, but there are the following strategies to handle small files: