That's why it was taking 2 seconds :) What happens in getTSMeta is that it will issue another GetRequest for the specified row. Instead, for this method, you want to override the scanner to fetch the META_QUALIFIER column instead of the COUNTER_QUALIFIER and then the scanner will return the meta data column. Then call TSMeta.parseFromColumn() to parse out the row.get(0).value(); and it will return the TSMeta object. This should be much closer to the 60ms you're looking for.