You can remove the json file and that will be treated as all sstables are now in L0. Since you have lot of data, the compaction will take a very long time. See the comment below directly from Cassandra code. If you chose to do this, you might want to increase the rate of compaction by usual means. If you are on spinning, then it might be a very big problem. During the time of compaction, the read performance will be impacted.
Unless there is a very urgent need to change the sstable size, I would change the size and let it take it own course organically. // LevelDB gives each level a score of how much data it contains vs its ideal amount, and // compacts the level with the highest score. But this falls apart spectacularly once you // get behind. Consider this set of levels: // L0: 988 [ideal: 4] // L1: 117 [ideal: 10] // L2: 12 [ideal: 100] // // The problem is that L0 has a much higher score (almost 250) than L1 (11), so what we'll // do is compact a batch of MAX_COMPACTING_L0 sstables with all 117 L1 sstables, and put the // result (say, 120 sstables) in L1. Then we'll compact the next batch of MAX_COMPACTING_L0, // and so forth. So we spend most of our i/o rewriting the L1 data with each batch. // // If we could just do *all* L0 a single time with L1, that would be ideal. But we can't // -- see the javadoc for MAX_COMPACTING_L0. // // LevelDB's way around this is to simply block writes if L0 compaction falls behind. // We don't have that luxury. // // So instead, we // 1) force compacting higher levels first, which minimizes the i/o needed to compact // optimially which gives us a long term win, and // 2) if L0 falls behind, we will size-tiered compact it to reduce read overhead until // we can catch up on the higher levels. // // This isn't a magic wand -- if you are consistently writing too fast for LCS to keep // up, you're still screwed. But if instead you have intermittent bursts of activity, // it can help a lot. On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Andrew Bialecki <andrew.biale...@gmail.com > wrote: > My understanding is deleting the .json metadata file is the only way > currently. If you search the user list archives, there are folks who are > building tools to force compaction and rebuild sstables with the new size. > I believe there's been a bit of talk of potentially including those tools > as a pat of a future release. > > Also, to answer your question about bloom filters, those are handled > differently and if you run upgradesstables after altering the BF FP ratio, > that will rebuild the BFs for each sstable. > > > On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 2:49 PM, Janne Jalkanen > <janne.jalka...@ecyrd.com>wrote: > >> >> I don't think upgradesstables is enough, since it's more of a "change >> this file to a new format but don't try to merge sstables and compact" >> -thing. >> >> Deleting the .json -file is probably the only way, but someone more >> familiar with cassandra LCS might be able to tell whether manually editing >> the json file so that you drop all sstables a level might work? Since they >> would overflow the new level, they would compact soon, but the impact might >> be less drastic than just deleting the .json file (which takes everything >> to L0)... >> >> /Janne >> >> On 22 Jul 2013, at 16:02, Keith Wright <kwri...@nanigans.com> wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> I know there has been several threads recently on this but I wanted to >> make sure I got a clear answer: we are looking to increase our SSTable >> size for a couple of our LCS tables as well as chunk size (to match the SSD >> block size). The largest table is at 500 GB across 6 nodes (RF 3, C* >> 1.2.4 VNodes). I wanted to get feedback on the best way to make this >> change with minimal load impact on the cluster. After I make the change, I >> understand that I need to force the nodes to re-compact the tables. >> >> Can this be done via upgrade sstables or do I need to shutdown the node, >> delete the .json file, and restart as some have suggested? >> >> I assume I can do this one node at a time? >> >> If I change the bloom filter size, I assume I will need to force >> compaction again? Using the same methodology? >> >> Thank you >> >> >> >