I have the same wonder. We started with the default 5M and the compaction after repair takes too long on 200G node, so we increase the size to 10M sort of arbitrarily since there is not much documentation around it. Our tech op team still thinks there are too many files in one directory. To fulfill the guidelines from them (don't remember the exact number, but something in the range of 50K files), we will need to increase the size to around 50M. I think the latency of opening one file is not impacted much by the number of files in one directory for the modern file system. But "ls" and other operations suffer.
Anyway, I asked about the side effect of the bigger SSTable in IRC, someone was mentioning during read, C* reads the whole SSTable from disk in order to access the row which causes more disk IO compared with the smaller SSTable. I don't know enough about the internal of the Cassandra, not sure whether it's the case or not. If that is the case (with question mark) , the SSTable or the row is kept in the memory? Hope someone can confirm the theory here. Or I have to dig in to the source code to find it. Another concern is during repair, does it stream the whole SSTable or the partial of it when mismatch is detected? I see the claim for both, can someone please confirm also? The last thing is the effectiveness of the parallel LCS on 1.2. It takes quite some time for the compaction to finish after repair for LCS for 1.1.X. Both CPU and disk Util is low during the compaction which means LCS doesn't fully utilized resource. It will make the life easier if the issue is addressed in 1.2. Bottom line is that there is not much documentation/guideline/successful story around LCS although it sounds beautiful on paper. Thanks. -Wei ________________________________ From: Alain RODRIGUEZ <arodr...@gmail.com> To: user@cassandra.apache.org Cc: Wei Zhu <wz1...@yahoo.com> Sent: Friday, March 8, 2013 1:25 AM Subject: Re: Size Tiered -> Leveled Compaction I'm still wondering about how to chose the size of the sstable under LCS. Defaul is 5MB, people use to configure it to 10MB and now you configure it at 128MB. What are the benefits or inconveniants of a very small size (let's say 5 MB) vs big size (like 128MB) ? Alain 2013/3/8 Al Tobey <a...@ooyala.com> We saw the exactly the same thing as Wei Zhu, > 100k tables in a directory causing all kinds of issues. We're running 128MiB ssTables with LCS and have disabled compaction throttling. 128MiB was chosen to get file counts under control and reduce the number of files C* has to manage & search. I just looked and a ~250GiB node is using about 10,000 files, which is quite manageable. This configuration is running smoothly in production under mixed read/write load. > > >We're on RAID0 across 6 15k drives per machine. When we migrated data to this >cluster we were pushing well over 26k/s+ inserts with CL_QUORUM. With >compaction throttling enabled at any rate it just couldn't keep up. With >throttling off, it runs smoothly and does not appear to have an impact on our >applications, so we always leave it off, even in EC2. An 8GiB heap is too >small for this config on 1.1. YMMV. > >-Al Tobey > > >On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Wei Zhu <wz1...@yahoo.com> wrote: > >I haven't tried to switch compaction strategy. We started with LCS. >> >> >>For us, after massive data imports (5000 w/seconds for 6 days), the first >>repair is painful since there is quite some data inconsistency. For 150G >>nodes, repair brought in about 30 G and created thousands of pending >>compactions. It took almost a day to clear those. Just be prepared LCS is >>really slow in 1.1.X. System performance degrades during that time since >>reads could go to more SSTable, we see 20 SSTable lookup for one read.. (We >>tried everything we can and couldn't speed it up. I think it's single >>threaded.... and it's not recommended to turn on multithread compaction. We >>even tried that, it didn't help )There is parallel LCS in 1.2 which is >>supposed to alleviate the pain. Haven't upgraded yet, hope it works:) >> >> >>http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/performance-improvements-in-cassandra-1-2 >> >> >> >> >> >>Since our cluster is not write intensive, only 100 w/seconds. I don't see any >>pending compactions during regular operation. >> >> >>One thing worth mentioning is the size of the SSTable, default is 5M which is >>kind of small for 200G (all in one CF) data set, and we are on SSD. It more >>than 150K files in one directory. (200G/5M = 40K SSTable and each SSTable >>creates 4 files on disk) You might want to watch that and decide the SSTable >>size. >> >> >>By the way, there is no concept of Major compaction for LCS. Just for fun, >>you can look at a file called $CFName.json in your data directory and it >>tells you the SSTable distribution among different levels. >> >> >>-Wei >> >> >> >>________________________________ >> From: Charles Brophy <cbro...@zulily.com> >>To: user@cassandra.apache.org >>Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 8:29 AM >>Subject: Re: Size Tiered -> Leveled Compaction >> >> >> >>I second these questions: we've been looking into changing some of our CFs to >>use leveled compaction as well. If anybody here has the wisdom to answer them >>it would be of wonderful help. >> >> >>Thanks >>Charles >> >> >>On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 7:50 AM, Mike <mthero...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> >>Hello, >>> >>>I'm investigating the transition of some of our column families from Size >>>Tiered -> Leveled Compaction. I believe we have some high-read-load column >>>families that would benefit tremendously. >>> >>>I've stood up a test DB Node to investigate the transition. I successfully >>>alter the column family, and I immediately noticed a large number (1000+) >>>pending compaction tasks become available, but no compaction get executed. >>> >>>I tried running "nodetool sstableupgrade" on the column family, and the >>>compaction tasks don't move. >>> >>>I also notice no changes to the size and distribution of the existing >>>SSTables. >>> >>>I then run a major compaction on the column family. All pending compaction >>>tasks get run, and the SSTables have a distribution that I would expect from >>>LeveledCompaction (lots and lots of 10MB files). >>> >>>Couple of questions: >>> >>>1) Is a major compaction required to transition from size-tiered to leveled >>>compaction? >>>2) Are major compactions as much of a concern for LeveledCompaction as their >>>are for Size Tiered? >>> >>>All the documentation I found concerning transitioning from Size Tiered to >>>Level compaction discuss the alter table cql command, but I haven't found >>>too much on what else needs to be done after the schema change. >>> >>>I did these tests with Cassandra 1.1.9. >>> >>>Thanks, >>>-Mike >>> >> >> >> >
