1) What determines the amount of memory used per schema ignoring the general overhead to get cassandra up and running? Is it just the size of the caches for the column Family + the memtable size ?
2) Is the size of the cache configured ( in terms of absolute numbers or percentages), an upper bound on the amount of memory that can be allocated and which grows as more data is filled up in the cache ? I believe the answer is yes...please correct me if I am wrong .... Assuming the answer is yes, What if I specify the cache size as X items and there is only enough memory to allocate for say, X-1000 items ? Will cassandra just allocate for X-1000 and keep swapping cache items in and out as required ? Is there a possibility of a crash due to lack of memory ? 3) Taking this one step further, if there is insufficient memory to allocate caches across column familes ( and across Keyspaces), Will cassandra pull memory of one cache and allocate it to the other one as required ? ( a little over-ambitious..but thought I would just ask instead of assuming) Thank you Kannan