There's quite a lot of steps that takes place during the startup sequence between these 2 lines:
>> *INFO [main] 2020-05-31 23:51:15,555 Gossiper.java:1723 - No gossip >> backlog; proceeding*INFO [main] 2020-05-31 23:54:06,867 >> NativeTransportService.java:70 - Netty using native Epoll event loop >> > For the most part, it's taken up by CompactionStrategyManager and DiskBoundaryManager. If you check debug.log, you'll see that it's mostly updating disk boundaries. The length of time it takes is proportional to the number of tables in the cluster. Have a look at this section [1] of CassandraDaemon if you're interested in the details of the startup sequence. Cheers! [1] https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/cassandra-3.11.3/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/service/CassandraDaemon.java#L399-L435
