I haven't used Google's software. Hadoop is in Java. If Google's implementation is in C or C++, that could explain a bit of the performance overhead. 4-6 times

I haven't used Google's software. Hadoop is in Java. If Google's implementation is in C or C++, that could explain a bit of the performance overhead. 4-6 times is crazy though. You sure it just wasn't due to data access latencies?