One thing that's really, really bothered me for a while is how we default to 256 tokens still. There's no experienced operator that leaves it as is at this point, meaning the only people using 256 are the poor folks that just got started using C*. I've worked with over a hundred clusters in the last couple years, and I think I only worked with one that had lowered it to something else.
I think it's time we changed the default to 4 (or 8, up for debate). To improve the behavior, we need to change a couple other things. The allocate_tokens_for_keyspace setting is... odd. It requires you have a keyspace already created, which doesn't help on new clusters. What I'd like to do is add a new setting, allocate_tokens_for_rf, and set it to 3 by default. To handle clusters that are already using 256 tokens, we could prevent the new node from joining unless a -D flag is set to explicitly allow imbalanced tokens. We've agreed to a trunk freeze, but I feel like this is important enough (and pretty trivial) to do now. I'd also personally characterize this as a bug fix since 256 is horribly broken when the cluster gets to any reasonable size, but maybe I'm alone there. I honestly can't think of a use case where random tokens is a good choice anymore, so I'd be fine / ecstatic with removing it completely and requiring either allocate_tokens_for_keyspace (for existing clusters) or allocate_tokens_for_rf to be set. Thoughts? Objections? -- Jon Haddad http://www.rustyrazorblade.com twitter: rustyrazorblade
