I had a one-node Cassandra 2.1.3 cluster, where the output of nodetool status looked like this:
Datacenter: datacenter1 ======================= Status=Up/Down |/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving -- Address Load Tokens Owns Host ID Rack UN 172.31.20.10 12.94 MB 256 ? f803cae9-3f12-40c9-b681-caf4829b6bc6 rack1 Then I added another host to the cluster, and according to the logs it did some bootstrapping: INFO [main] 2015-04-23 06:25:41,955 StorageService.java:1008 - JOINING: schema complete, ready to bootstrap INFO [main] 2015-04-23 06:25:41,955 StorageService.java:1008 - JOINING: calculation complete, ready to bootstrap INFO [main] 2015-04-23 06:25:41,956 StorageService.java:1008 - JOINING: getting bootstrap token INFO [main] 2015-04-23 06:26:11,999 StorageService.java:1008 - JOINING: Starting to bootstrap... INFO [main] 2015-04-23 06:26:12,159 StreamResultFuture.java:86 - [Stream #a2d70110-e981-11e4-90fe-03a9e0dac111] Executing streaming plan for Bootstrap INFO [main] 2015-04-23 06:26:13,225 StorageService.java:1037 - Bootstrap completed! for the tokens [-6649489682159922872, But when I ran nodetool status after the new node had joined the cluster, it looked like this: Datacenter: datacenter1 ======================= Status=Up/Down |/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving -- Address Load Tokens Owns Host ID Rack UN 172.31.21.108 3.78 MB 256 ? 0fc3f5ac-c414-4340-b072-7d9959a28209 rack1 UN 172.31.20.10 15.45 MB 256 ? f803cae9-3f12-40c9-b681-caf4829b6bc6 rack1 So I was expecting the load to drop to about 6.5 MB on my original node while the new node would pick up about 6.5 MB, so they'd be balanced, but instead the disk usage on my original node somehow increased by 2.5 MB while the new node only picked up 3.78 MB. Why didn't I get a balanced load? Why did the load on my original node go up when I added another node? I didn't write any points during the bootstrap. All my keyspaces that have a lot of data have replication factor 1, so I think and hope it wasn't just replicating data on the new node. Thanks!
