> Not in 0.6 I believe, but I believe this recently went into trunk for > the upcoming 0.7.
By "not in 0.6" i mean in terms of the configuration. If you are willing to modify the source you can change it fairly easily by changing the private constants towards the beginning of org/apache/cassandra/db/CompactionManager.java: private int minimumCompactionThreshold = 4; // compact this many sstables min at a time private int maximumCompactionThreshold = 32; // compact this many sstables max at a time Note that increasing the min will tend to mean more overall compaction, while decreasing it means less overall compaction. The trade-off is potentially slower reads due to more sstables having to be consulted (meaning, more seeking). If you're worried about decreasing amount of compaction, you don't want to decrease the 'max'. It *might*, under some circumstances, contribute to decreasing the impact of compaction once it happens, but that would be highly dependent on I/O scheduling and other circumstances. I wouldn't touch if unless I knew specifically there was a reason to. -- / Peter Schuller