I ran an application today that attempted to fetch 20,000+ unique row keys in one query against a set of completely empty column families. On a 4-node cluster (EC2 m1.large instances) with the recommended memory settings (2 GB heap), every single node immediately ran out of memory and became unresponsive, to the point where I had to kill -9 the cassandra processes.
Now clearly this query is not the best idea in the world, but the effects of it are a bit disturbing. What could be going on here? Are there any other query pitfalls I should be aware of that have the potential to explode the entire cluster? -j
