Hmm..This is a generic void populatePut function. It's called for each string put that is generated. We don't need to check if job conf is null for each such put, there are jobs with 70k puts. Only if key under consideration is map millis or reduce millis, we need to check for job conf being null. I think the helper function will not reduce to code, since for map millis we need to get a different job conf parameter map.memory.mb and for reduce millis, we need a different one (reduce memory mb).