After Sylvain added support for removing tombstones during minor compactions in 0.6.6 (see http://www.riptano.com/blog/whats-new-cassandra-066), doing major compactions should be considered unnecessary until otherwise demonstrated for your workload. (If you happen to have weekly slow periods into which major compaction fits conveniently, then great, it won't hurt things, but otherwise, leave it off.)
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Wayne <wav...@gmail.com> wrote: > Can anyone speak to best practices for running manual compaction in > production? Our assumption is that without it the sstables will become too > fragmented...is this an accepted "fact"? Obviously it depends on the volume > of writes, but I am looking for current production practices. > > Since it takes a lot of resources and 4-5 hours for our current node size of > 500Gb weekly seems like a sensible option for us. Is this a normal practice? > > Is it best to run on all nodes at the same time or staggered across nodes to > reduce total cluster slow-down? Given that full compaction has a major > affect on a node and its ability to function under heavy load our assumption > is that staggered over the weekend for example (our low usage time) would be > best. > > Any recommendations? > > Thanks > > Wayne > > -- Jonathan Ellis Project Chair, Apache Cassandra co-founder of Riptano, the source for professional Cassandra support http://riptano.com