Yes, if you are not deleting fast enough they will grow. This is not specifically a cassandra problem /var/log/messages has the same issue.
There is a JIRA ticket about having a maximum size for SSTables, so they always stay manageable You fall into a small trap when you force major compaction in that many small tables turn into one big one, from their it is hard to get back to many smaller ones again, the other side of the coin if you do not major compact you can end up with much more disk usage then live data (IE large % of disk is overwrites and tombstones). You can tune the compaction rate now so compaction does not kill your IO. Generally I think avoiding really large SSTables is the best way to do. Scale out and avoid very large SSTables/node if possible. Edward On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Jonathan Colby <jonathan.co...@gmail.com>wrote: > > The way compaction works, "x" same-sized files are merged into a new > SSTable. This repeats itself and the SSTable get bigger and bigger. > > So what is the upper limit?? If you are not deleting stuff fast enough, > wouldn't the SSTable sizes grow indefinitely? > > I ask because we have some rather large SSTable files (80-100 GB) and I'm > starting to worry about future compactions. > > Second, compacting such large files is an IO killer. What can be tuned > other than compaction_threshold to help optimize this and prevent the files > from getting too big? > > Thanks!
