> is this behaviour expected since the RF (for the duration of when 1 node was > taken out) > is higher than the # of nodes?
Note that repair is not needed just because a node was off for a while. I am guessing the performance difference was due to the repair. Try running repair at any time and see if you get the same effect. If you are testing with a large data set, repair is probably responsible for evicting data from OS page cache. -- / Peter Schuller
