Hi, I've checked the memtable flush (cassandra 0.8.4) and it seams to me it hapens sooner then the threshold is reached.
Here's the threshould's (the default ones calculated for a heap size of -Xmx1980M): ColumnFamily: idx_graphable (Super) Key Validation Class: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.BytesType Default column value validator: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.BytesType Columns sorted by: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.UTF8Type/org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.UTF8Type Row cache size / save period in seconds: 0.0/0 Key cache size / save period in seconds: 200000.0/14400 *Memtable thresholds: 0.5671875/1440/121 (millions of ops/minutes/MB)* GC grace seconds: 864000 Compaction min/max thresholds: 4/32 Read repair chance: 1.0 Replicate on write: true In the logs it seams to me none oh the thresold is reached ( definitively minutes threshold is not reached ). 9-08 20:12:30,136 MeteredFlusher.java (line 62) flushing high-traffic column family ColumnFamilyStore(table='graph', columnFamily='idx_graphable') INFO [NonPeriodicTasks:1] 2011-09-08 20:12:30,144 ColumnFamilyStore.java (line 1036) Enqueuing flush of Memtable-idx_graphable@915643571*(4671498/96780112 serialized/live bytes, 59891 ops)* INFO [FlushWriter:111] 2011-09-08 20:12:30,145 Memtable.java (line 237) Writing Memtable-idx_graphable@915643571(4671498/96780112 serialized/live bytes, 59891 ops) INFO [FlushWriter:111] 2011-09-08 20:12:30,348 Memtable.java (line 254) Completed flushing [...]/cassandra/data/graph/idx_graphable-g-23-Data.db (4673905 bytes) Could someone clarify it for me ? "high-traffic column family" has a special meaning ? Many thanks, Sorin