> Relatedly, I'd love to learn how to reliably reproduce full GC pauses > on C* 1.1+.
Our full gc:s are typically not very frequent. Few days or even weeks in between, depending on cluster. But it happens on several clusters; I'm guessing most (but I haven't done a systematic analysis). The only question is how often. But given the lack of handling of such failure modes, the effect on clients is huge. Recommend data reads by default to mitigate this and a slew of other sources of problems (and for counter increments, we're rolling out least-active-request routing). -- / Peter Schuller (@scode, http://worldmodscode.wordpress.com)
