Some things to consider:
Check for contention around the switch lock. This can happen if you get a lot
of tables flushing at the same time, or if you have a lot of secondary indexes.
It shows up as a pattern in the logs. As soon a the writer starts flushing a
memtable another will be queued. P
Oh, and my startup command that cassandra logged was
a2.bigde.nrel.gov: xss = -ea -javaagent:/opt/cassandra/lib/jamm-0.2.5.jar
-XX:+UseThreadPriorities -XX:ThreadPriorityPolicy=42 -Xms8021M -Xmx8021M
-Xmn1600M -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Xss128k
And I remember from docs you don't want to go
Here is the printout before that log which is probably important as wellŠ..
INFO [ScheduledTasks:1] 2013-02-20 07:14:00,375 GCInspector.java (line
122) GC for ConcurrentMarkSweep: 3618 ms for 2 collections, 7038159096
used; max is 8243904512
INFO [ScheduledTasks:1] 2013-02-20 07:14:00,375 Status
