> I'm using level compaction and I have about 200GB compressed in my > largest CFs. The disks are getting full. This is time-series data so I > want to drop data that is a couple of months old. It's pretty easy for > me to iterate through the relevant keys and delete the rows. But will > that do anything? > I currently have the majority of sstables at generation 4. Deleting rows > will initially just create a ton of tombstones. For them to actually > free up significant space they need to get promoted to gen 4 and cause a > compaction there, right? nodetool compact doesn't do anything with level > compaction, it seems. Am I doomed? > (Ok, I'll whip out my CC and order more disk ;-)
There is a delay before you will see the effects of deletions in terms of disk space, yes. However, this is not normally a problem because you effectively reach a steady state of disk usage. It only becomes a problem if you're almost *entirely* full and are trying to delete data in a panic. How far away are you from entirely full? Are you just worried about the future or are you about to run out of disk space right now? -- / Peter Schuller (@scode, http://worldmodscode.wordpress.com)
