The JVM will not swap out if you have JNA.jar in the path or you have disabled swap on the machine (the simplest thing to do).
Cassandra uses memory mapped file access. If you have 16GB of ram, 8 will go to the JVM and the rest can be used by the os to cache files. (Plus the off heap stuff) Cheers ----------------- Aaron Morton Freelance Developer @aaronmorton http://www.thelastpickle.com On 16/05/2012, at 11:12 AM, Yiming Sun wrote: > Thanks Tyler... so my understanding is, even if Cassandra doesn't do off-heap > caching, by having a large-enough memory, it minimize the chance of swapping > the java heap to a disk. Is that correct? > > -- Y. > > On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Tyler Hobbs <ty...@datastax.com> wrote: > On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Yiming Sun <yiming....@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > I was reading the Apache Cassandra 1.0 Documentation PDF dated May 10, 2012, > and had some questions on what the recommended memory size is. > > Below is the snippet from the PDF. Bullet 1 suggests to have 16-32GB of RAM, > yet Bullet 2 suggests to limit Java heap size to no more than 8GB. My > understanding is that Cassandra is implemented purely in Java, so all memory > it sees and uses is the JVM Heap. > > The main way that additional RAM helps is through the OS page cache, which > will store hot portions of SSTables in memory. Additionally, Cassandra can > now do off-heap caching. > > > So can someone help me understand the discrepancy between 16-32GB of RAM and > 8GB of heap? Thanks. > > == snippet == > Memory > The more memory a Cassandra node has, the better read performance. More RAM > allows for larger cache sizes and > reduces disk I/O for reads. More RAM also allows memory tables (memtables) to > hold more recently written data. Larger > memtables lead to a fewer number of SSTables being flushed to disk and fewer > files to scan during a read. The ideal > amount of RAM depends on the anticipated size of your hot data. > > • For dedicated hardware, a minimum of than 8GB of RAM is needed. DataStax > recommends 16GB - 32GB. > > • Java heap space should be set to a maximum of 8GB or half of your total > RAM, whichever is lower. (A greater > heap size has more intense garbage collection periods.) > > • For a virtual environment use a minimum of 4GB, such as Amazon EC2 Large > instances. For production clusters > with a healthy amount of traffic, 8GB is more common. > > > > -- > Tyler Hobbs > DataStax > >
