Hi Stefan, Your analysis is exactly what happen ! What I can say is that we are migrating from php to java and the behaviour of the php (or cpp) driver is completely different.
* The topology of the cassandra cluster returned by the contact point with the php driver includes data nodes + proxy nodes. * The topology of the cassandra cluster returned by the contact point with the java driver only includes data nodes and there is a control based on system.peers table. If this helps, proxy nodes are part of gossip and participate to handshakes. They can be listed with "nodetool gossipinfo" (but I don't find a system table having this information) but they are not listed with "nodetool status" and are not registered in system.peers. The challenge is probably to understand how the php driver achieve to have a full list with proxy nodes.
