AryaNet

Cassandra garbage collector tuning has been a hot topic of discussion in the Cassandra user mailing list from time to time. Users and administrators are required to gain some skills on how to properly tune the garbage collector for their Cassandra nodes so that they can avoid long stop the world pauses that can bring their cluster to halt. Although out of the box garbage collector settings work for most use cases,  as the data volume and request traffic per Cassandra node increases, the demand for tuning garbage collector increases also. In this article I’ll explain how you can analyze your Java Virtual Machine and optimize its heap size and settings for your use case. Some of the techniques described here can be applied to tuning any application running on JVM, but majority of them only apply to the way Cassandra works.