title: Hbase number of regions keep growing
body: <p>We are using hbase version 1.1.4. The DB has a around 40 tables, and each table data has a TimeToLive specified. It is deployed on a 5 node cluster, and the following is the hbase-site.xml</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;phoenix.query.threadPoolSize&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;2048&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  
  &lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;hbase.hregion.max.filesize&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;21474836480&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  
  &lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;hbase.hregion.memstore.block.multiplier&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;4&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  &lt;!-- default is 64MB 67108864 --&gt;
  &lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;hbase.hregion.memstore.flush.size&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;536870912&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  &lt;!-- default is 7, should be at least 2x compactionThreshold --&gt;
  &lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;hbase.hstore.blockingStoreFiles&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;240&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  &lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;hbase.client.scanner.caching&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;10000&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  
  &lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;hbase.bucketcache.ioengine&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;offheap&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  &lt;property&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;hbase.bucketcache.size&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;40960&lt;/value&gt;
  &lt;/property&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Question is that the number of regions on each of the regionservers keep growing. Currently we only merge regions using</p>
  
  <pre><code>merge_region in the hbase shell.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any way to have only a fixed number of regions, on each server, or an automated way to merge the regions? </p>