> I have seen several off-hand mentions that writes are inherently faster than > reads. Why is this so?
I believe the primary factor people are referring to is that writes are faster than reads in terms of disk I/O because writes are inherently sequential. Writes initially only happen in-memory plus in a (sequentially written) commit log; when flushed out to an sstable that is likewise sequential writing. Reads on the other hand, to the extent that they go down to disk, will suffer the usual overhead associated with disk seeks. See http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/ArchitectureInternals for details. -- / Peter Schuller aka scode
