I'm wondering what will clear tombstoned rows? nodetool cleanup, nodetool repair, or time (as in just wait)?
I had a CF that was more or less storing session information. After some time, we decided that one piece of this information was pointless to track (and was 90%+ of the columns, and in 99% of those cases was ALL columns for a row). I wrote a process to remove all of those columns (which again in a vast majority of cases had the effect of removing the whole row). This CF had ~1 billion rows, so I expect to be left with ~100m rows. After I did this mass delete, everything was the same size on disk (which I expected, knowing how tombstoning works). It wasn't 100% clear to me what to poke to cause compactions to clear the tombstones. First I tried nodetool cleanup on a candidate node. But, afterwards the disk usage was the same. Then I tried nodetool repair on that same node. But again, disk usage is still the same. The CF has no snapshots. So, am I misunderstanding something? Is there another operation to try? Do I have to "just wait"? I've only done cleanup/repair on one node. Do I have to run one or the other over all nodes to clear tombstones? Cassandra 1.2.15 if it matters, Thanks! will
