[CASSANDRA-15379] Flush with fast compressors by default

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 4.0-beta1, 4.0
• Component/s: Local/Compaction, Local/Config, Local/Memtable
• Change Category: Performance
• Complexity: Low Hanging Fruit
• Platform: All

Source Control Link

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/commit/9c1bbf3ac913f9bdf7a0e0922106804af42d2c1e

Test and Documentation Plan

Tests: Automated unit tests and manual testing.

Documentation: Included docs of the new options both in the yaml and in the website

 

After review will do a more thorough manual test and docs.

• Assignee: Joey Lynch
• Reporter: Joey Lynch

Authors

Joey Lynch

Reviewers

Dinesh Joshi

• Created: 27/Oct/19 00:38
• Updated: 15/May/20 08:53
• Resolved: 24/Apr/20 06:30

Description

josnyder and I have been testing out CASSANDRA-14482 (Zstd compression) on some of our most dense clusters and have been observing close to 50% reduction in footprint with Zstd on some of our workloads! Unfortunately though we have been running into an issue where the flush might take so long (Zstd is slower to compress than LZ4) that we can actually block the next flush and cause instability.

Internally we are working around this with a very simple patch which flushes SSTables as the default compression strategy (LZ4) regardless of the table params. This is a simple solution but I think the ideal solution though might be for the flush compression strategy to be configurable separately from the table compression strategy (while defaulting to the same thing). Instead of adding yet another compression option to the yaml (like hints and commitlog) I was thinking of just adding it to the table parameters and then adding a default_table_parameters yaml option like:

# Default table properties to apply on freshly created tables. The currently supported defaults are:
# * compression       : How are SSTables compressed in general (flush, compaction, etc ...)
# * flush_compression : How are SSTables compressed as they flush
# supported
default_table_parameters:
  compression:
    class_name: 'LZ4Compressor'
    parameters:
      chunk_length_in_kb: 16
  flush_compression:
    class_name: 'LZ4Compressor'
    parameters:
      chunk_length_in_kb: 4

This would have the nice effect as well of giving our configuration a path forward to providing user specified defaults for table creation (so e.g. if a particular user wanted to use a different default chunk_length_in_kb they can do that).

So the proposed (~mandatory) scope is:

• Flush with a faster compression strategy

I'd like to implement the following at the same time:

• Per table flush compression configuration
• Ability to default the table flush and compaction compression in the yaml.