What is listEndpointsPendingHints?

[Tom van den Berge]

When I run the operation "listEndpointsPendingHints" on the
mbean org.apache.cassandra.db:type=HintedHandoffManager, I'm getting

( 126879603237190600081737151857243914981 )

It suggests that there are pending hints, but the
org.apache.cassandra.internal:type=HintedHandoff mbean provides these
figures:

TotalBlockedTasks = 0;
CurrentlyBlockedTasks = 0;
CoreThreads = 2;
MaximumThreads = 2;
ActiveCount = 0;
PendingTasks = 0;
CompletedTasks = 0;

I'm wondering what it means that it returns a value, and what this value
is? It looks like a token, but it's not one of the tokens of my nodes.

The reason I'm looking into this is that my cluster suffering every now and
then from never ending (dead) hinted handoff tasks, resulting in a flooding
of hints on the node.

Thanks,
Tom