Recently we faced an issue where every repair operation caused addition of hundreds of sstables (CASSANDRA-9146). In order to bring situation under control and make sure reads are not impacted, we were left with no option but to run major compaction to ensure that thousands of tiny sstables are compacted.
Queries: Does major compaction has any drawback after automatic tombstone compaction got implemented in 1.2 via tombstone_threshold sub-property(CASSANDRA-3442)? I understand that the huge SSTable created after major compaction wont be compacted with new data any time soon but is that a problem if purged data is removed via automatic tombstone compaction? If we major compaction results in a huge file say 500GB, what are the drawbacks of it? If one big sstable is a problem, is there any way of solving the problem? We tried running sstablesplit after major compaction to split the big sstable but as new sstables were of same size they are again compacted into single huge table once Cassandra was started after executing sstablesplit. Thanks Anuj Wadehra
