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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-1608?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13031303#comment-13031303
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Jonathan Ellis commented on CASSANDRA-1608:
-------------------------------------------

Here is the approach used by LevelDB 
(http://leveldb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/impl.html)

"The set of sorted tables are organized into a sequence of levels. The sorted 
table generated from a [flush] is placed in a special young level (also called 
level-0). When the number of young files exceeds a certain threshold (currently 
four), all of the young files are merged together with all of the overlapping 
level-1 files to produce a sequence of new level-1 files (we create a new 
level-1 file for every 2MB of data.)

"Files in the young level may contain overlapping keys. However files in other 
levels have distinct non-overlapping key ranges. Consider level number L where 
L >= 1. When the combined size of files in level-L exceeds (10^L) MB (i.e., 
10MB for level-1, 100MB for level-2, ...), one file in level-L, and all of the 
overlapping files in level-(L+1) are merged to form a set of new files for 
level-(L+1). These merges have the effect of gradually migrating new updates 
from the young level to the largest level using only bulk reads and writes 
(i.e., minimizing expensive seeks)

"When the size of level L exceeds its limit, we compact it in a background 
thread. The compaction picks a file from level L and all overlapping files from 
the next level L+1. Note that if a level-L file overlaps only part of a 
level-(L+1) file, the entire file at level-(L+1) is used as an input to the 
compaction and will be discarded after the compaction. Aside: because level-0 
is special (files in it may overlap each other), we treat compactions from 
level-0 to level-1 specially: a level-0 compaction may pick more than one 
level-0 file in case some of these files overlap each other.

"A compaction merges the contents of the picked files to produce a sequence of 
level-(L+1) files. We switch to producing a new level-(L+1) file after the 
current output file has reached the target file size (2MB). We also switch to a 
new output file when the key range of the current output file has grown enough 
to overlap more then ten level-(L+2) files. This last rule ensures that a later 
compaction of a level-(L+1) file will not pick up too much data from 
level-(L+2).

"Compactions for a particular level rotate through the key space. In more 
detail, for each level L, we remember the ending key of the last compaction at 
level L. The next compaction for level L will pick the first file that starts 
after this key (wrapping around to the beginning of the key space if there is 
no such file).

"Level-0 compactions will read up to four 1MB files from level-0, and at worst 
all the level-1 files (10MB). I.e., we will read 14MB and write 14MB.

"Other than the special level-0 compactions, we will pick one 2MB file from 
level L. In the worst case, this will overlap ~ 12 files from level L+1 (10 
because level-(L+1) is ten times the size of level-L, and another two at the 
boundaries since the file ranges at level-L will usually not be aligned with 
the file ranges at level-L+1). The compaction will therefore read 26MB and 
write 26MB. Assuming a disk IO rate of 100MB/s (ballpark range for modern 
drives), the worst compaction cost will be approximately 0.5 second.

"If we throttle the background writing to something small, say 10% of the full 
100MB/s speed, a compaction may take up to 5 seconds. If the user is writing at 
10MB/s, we might build up lots of level-0 files (~50 to hold the 5*10MB). This 
may signficantly increase the cost of reads due to the overhead of merging more 
files together on every read.

Then there is some discussion on possible solutions to this problem.

> Redesigned Compaction
> ---------------------
>
>                 Key: CASSANDRA-1608
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-1608
>             Project: Cassandra
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: Core
>            Reporter: Chris Goffinet
>
> After seeing the I/O issues in CASSANDRA-1470, I've been doing some more 
> thinking on this subject that I wanted to lay out.
> I propose we redo the concept of how compaction works in Cassandra. At the 
> moment, compaction is kicked off based on a write access pattern, not read 
> access pattern. In most cases, you want the opposite. You want to be able to 
> track how well each SSTable is performing in the system. If we were to keep 
> statistics in-memory of each SSTable, prioritize them based on most accessed, 
> and bloom filter hit/miss ratios, we could intelligently group sstables that 
> are being read most often and schedule them for compaction. We could also 
> schedule lower priority maintenance on SSTable's not often accessed.
> I also propose we limit the size of each SSTable to a fix sized, that gives 
> us the ability to  better utilize our bloom filters in a predictable manner. 
> At the moment after a certain size, the bloom filters become less reliable. 
> This would also allow us to group data most accessed. Currently the size of 
> an SSTable can grow to a point where large portions of the data might not 
> actually be accessed as often.

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