There are two relevant bugs (that I know of), both resolved in somewhat recent versions, which make somewhat regular restarts beneficial
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-2868 (memory leak in GCInspector, fixed in 0.7.9/0.8.5) https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-2252 (heap fragmentation due to the way memtables used to be allocated, refactored in 1.0.0) Restarting daily is probably too frequent for either one of those problems. We usually notice degraded performance in our ancient cluster after ~2 weeks w/o a restart. As Aaron mentioned, if you have plenty of disk space, there's no reason to worry about "cruft" sstables. The size of your active set is what matters, and you can determine if that's getting too big by watching for iowait (due to reads from the data partition) and/or paging activity of the java process. When you hit that problem, the solution is to 1. try to tune your caches and 2. add more nodes to spread the load. I'll reiterate - looking at raw disk space usage should not be your guide for that. "Forcing" a gc generally works, but should not be relied upon (note "suggest" in http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/System.html#gc()). It's great news that 1.0 uses a better mechanism for releasing unused sstables. nodetool compact triggers a "major" compaction and is no longer a recommended by datastax (details here http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.0/operations/tuning#tuning-compaction bottom of the page). Hope this helps. Mike. On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 5:14 PM, aaron morton <aa...@thelastpickle.com>wrote: > That disk usage pattern is to be expected in pre 1.0 versions. Disk usage > is far less interesting than disk free space, if it's using 60 GB and there > is 200GB thats ok. If it's using 60Gb and there is 6MB free thats a problem. > > In pre 1.0 the compacted files are deleted on disk by waiting for the JVM > do decide to GC all remaining references. If there is not enough space (to > store the total size of the files it is about to write or compact) on disk > GC is forced and the files are deleted. Otherwise they will get deleted at > some point in the future. > > In 1.0 files are reference counted and space is freed much sooner. > > With regard to regular maintenance, node tool cleanup remvos data from a > node that it is no longer a replica for. This is only of use when you have > done a token move. > > I would not recommend a daily restart of the cassandra process. You will > lose all the run time optimizations the JVM has made (i think the mapped > files pages will stay resident). As well as adding additional entropy to > the system which must be repaired via HH, RR or nodetool repair. > > If you want to see compacted files purged faster the best approach would > be to upgrade to 1.0. > > Hope that helps. > > ----------------- > Aaron Morton > Freelance Developer > @aaronmorton > http://www.thelastpickle.com > > On 26/01/2012, at 9:51 AM, R. Verlangen wrote: > > In his message he explains that it's for " Forcing a GC ". GC stands for > garbage collection. For some more background see: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science) > > Cheers! > > 2012/1/25 <mike...@thomsonreuters.com> > >> Karl, >> >> Can you give a little more details on these 2 lines, what do they do? >> >> java -jar cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar - localhost:8080 >> java.lang:type=Memory gc >> >> Thank you, >> Mike >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Karl Hiramoto [mailto:k...@hiramoto.org] >> Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 12:26 PM >> To: user@cassandra.apache.org >> Subject: Re: Restart cassandra every X days? >> >> >> On 01/25/12 19:18, R. Verlangen wrote: >> > Ok thank you for your feedback. I'll add these tasks to our daily >> > cassandra maintenance cronjob. Hopefully this will keep things under >> > controll. >> >> I forgot to mention that we found that Forcing a GC also cleans up some >> space. >> >> >> in a cronjob you can do this with >> http://crawler.archive.org/cmdline-jmxclient/ >> >> >> my cronjob looks more like >> >> nodetool repair >> nodetool cleanup >> nodetool compact >> java -jar cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar - localhost:8080 >> java.lang:type=Memory gc >> >> -- >> Karl >> >> This email was sent to you by Thomson Reuters, the global news and >> information company. Any views expressed in this message are those of the >> individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be >> the views of Thomson Reuters. >> > > >
