Lot's of hints, but only on a few nodes

[Erik Forsberg]

I have this situation where a few (like, 3-4 out of 84) nodes misbehave. 
Very long GC pauses, dropping out of cluster etc.

This happens while loading data (via CQL), and analyzing metrics it 
looks like on these few nodes, a lot of hints are being generated close 
to the time when they start to misbehave.

Since this is Cassandra 2.0.13 which have a less than optimal hints 
implementation, largs numbers of hints is a GC troublemaker.

Again looking at metrics, it looks like hints are being generated for a 
large number of nodes, so it doesn't look like the destination nodes are 
at fault. So, I'm confused.

Any Hints (pun intended) on what could cause a few nodes to generate 
more hints than the rest of the cluster?

Regards,
\EF