> Also, if we repaired once successfully, will the next repair process take a more reasonable time? Depends on if there was a lot of inconsistent data to repair in the first place. Also full repairs or incremental?
Repairs are complicated and tricky to get working efficiently. If you're using vnodes you are probably going to have a really hard time. Another avenue is to tune your compaction strategy. The strategies are generally pretty bad at purging tombstones if you delete old data, so that should be avoided where possible, however there are some properties you can tune that might help. See tombstone_compaction_threshold. Note that in 2.1 it's not that effective as it only does singe SSTable compaction.
