Briefly, counters read before write, unlike other writes in Cassandra. http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-in-cassandra-0-8-part-2-counters " Counters have been designed to allow for very fast writes. However, increment does involve a read on one of the replica as part of replication. As a consequence, counter increments are expected to be slightly slower than regular writes. "
=Rob
