a colleague of mine came up with an alternative solution that also seems to work, and I'd just like your opinion on if it's sound.
we run find to list all old sstables, and then use cmdline-jmxclient to run the forceUserDefinedCompaction function on each of them, this is roughly what we do (but with find and xargs to orchestrate it) java -jar cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar - localhost:7199 org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager forceUserDefinedCompaction=the_keyspace,db_file_name the downside is that c* needs to read the file and do disk io, but the upside is that it doesn't require a restart. c* does a little more work, but we can schedule that during off-peak hours. another upside is that it feels like we're pretty safe from screwups, we won't accidentally remove an sstable with live data, the worst case is that we ask c* to compact an sstable with live data and end up with an identical sstable. if anyone else wants to do the same thing, this is the full cron command: 0 4 * * * find /path/to/cassandra/data/the_keyspace_name -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*-Data.db' -mtime +8 -printf "forceUserDefinedCompaction=the_keyspace_name,\%P\n" | xargs -t --no-run-if-empty java -jar /usr/local/share/java/cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar - localhost:7199 org.apache.cassandra.db:type=CompactionManager just change the keyspace name and the path to the data directory. T# On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 7:09 AM, Theo Hultberg <t...@iconara.net> wrote: > thanks a lot. I can confirm that it solved our problem too. > > looks like the C* 2.0 feature is perfect for us. > > T# > > > On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 7:28 PM, Marcus Eriksson <krum...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> yep that works, you need to remove all components of the sstable though, >> not just -Data.db >> >> and, in 2.0 there is this: >> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5228 >> >> /Marcus >> >> >> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Theo Hultberg <t...@iconara.net> wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> I think I remember reading that if you have sstables that you know >>> contain only data that whose ttl has expired, it's safe to remove them >>> manually by stopping c*, removing the *-Data.db files and then starting up >>> c* again. is this correct? >>> >>> we have a cluster where everything is written with a ttl, and sometimes >>> c* needs to compact over a 100 gb of sstables where we know ever has >>> expired, and we'd rather just manually get rid of those. >>> >>> T# >>> >> >> >
