Follow-up for anyone interested: disabling the Windows page file (which Windows makes kind of a pain) appears to resolve all issues. Cassandra is still using lots of memory but it gives it up as appropriate.
From: DuyHai Doan [mailto:doanduy...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, November 3, 2017 11:25 To: user <user@cassandra.apache.org> Subject: Re: Cassandra using a ton of native memory 8Gb of RAM being a recommended production setting for most of the workload out there. Having only 16Gb of RAM, and because Cassandra is relying a lot on system page cache, there should be no surprise that your 16Gb being eaten up. On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 5:40 PM, Austin Sharp <austin.sh...@seeq.com<mailto:austin.sh...@seeq.com>> wrote: I’ve investigated further. It appears that the performance issues are because Cassandra’s memory-mapped files (*.db files) fill up the physical memory and start being swapped to disk. Is this related to recommendations to disable swapping on a machine where Cassandra is installed? Should I disable memory-mapped IO? I can see issues in JIRA related to Windows memory-mapped I/O but they all appear to be fixed prior to 3.11. From: Austin Sharp [mailto:austin.sh...@seeq.com<mailto:austin.sh...@seeq.com>] Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2017 17:51 To: user@cassandra.apache.org<mailto:user@cassandra.apache.org> Subject: Cassandra using a ton of native memory Hi, I have a problem with Cassandra 3.11.0 on Windows. I'm testing a workload w= ith a lot of read-then-writes that had no significant problems on Cassandra= 2.x. However, now when this workload continues for a while (perhaps an hou= r), Cassandra or its JVM effectively use up all of the machine's 16GB of me= mory. Cassandra is started with -Xmx2147M, and JMX shows <2GB heap memory a= nd <100MB of off-heap memory. However, when I use something like Process Ex= plorer, I see that Cassandra has 10 to 11GB of memory in its working set, a= nd Windows shows essentially no free memory at all. Once the system has no = free memory, other processes suffer long sequences of unresponsiveness. I can't see anything terribly wrong from JMX metrics or log files - they ne= ver show more than 1GB of non-heap memory. Where should I look to investiga= te this further? Thanks, Austin
