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  1. Apache Cassandra
  2. CASSANDRA-1214

Force linux to not swap the JVM

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Details

    • Improvement
    • Status: Resolved
    • Normal
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • 0.6.5, 0.7 beta 2
    • None
    • None

    Description

      The way mmap()'d IO is handled in cassandra is dangerous. It allocates potentially massive buffers without any care for bounding the total size of the program's buffers. As the node's dataset grows, this will lead to swapping and instability.

      This is a dangerous and wrong default for a couple of reasons.

      1) People are likely to test cassandra with the default settings. This issue is insidious because it only appears when you have sufficient data in a certain node, there is absolutely no way to control it, and it doesn't at all respect the memory limits that you give to the JVM.

      That can all be ascertained by reading the code, and people should certainly do their homework, but nevertheless, cassandra should ship with sane defaults that don't break down when you cross some magic unknown threshold.

      2) It's deceptive. Unless you are extremely careful with capacity planning, you will get bit by this. Most people won't really be able to use this in production, so why get them excited about performance that they can't actually have?

      Attachments

        1. Read Throughput with mmap.jpg
          36 kB
          Schubert Zhang
        2. trunk-1214.txt
          13 kB
          Peter Schuller
        3. mlockall-jna.patch.txt
          2 kB
          Folke Behrens
        4. 1214-v3.txt
          8 kB
          Jonathan Ellis
        5. 1214-v4.txt
          10 kB
          Jonathan Ellis

        Activity

          People

            jbellis Jonathan Ellis
            jamesgolick James Golick
            Jonathan Ellis
            Jon Hermes
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            Dates

              Created:
              Updated:
              Resolved: