Is it possible to configure different write timeouts per Cassandra table? - cassandra

I have a datastax cassandra cluster with 8 nodes. The keyspace used by the application contains about 400 Tables. The parameter write_request_timeout_in_ms in the cassandra.yaml is set to 2000ms (default).
The default value is high enough for most tables. However, I for only two tables I require a much higher write_request_timeout. I know that stuff such as bloomfilter false-positive chance or compaction strategy can be configured per table.
Is that possible to do the same for timeouts and if so then how?
Regards

It isn't possible to configure different write timeouts because all writes are persisted to the same commitlog disk.
A coordinator will return a write timeout if not enough replicas (based on the write consistency level) acknowledged the write (to the commitlog disk) because the disk is busy.
Since there is only one commitlog disk on each node, it makes no sense to have different write timeouts. This in fact raises another question -- what problem are you trying to solve?
Increasing timeouts is almost never the right thing to do since all it does is hide the problem. You need to identify the root of the issue and fix it. Cheers!

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Cassandra repairs on TWCS

We have a 13 nodes Cassandra cluster (version 3.10) with RP 2 and read/write consistency of 1.
This means that the cluster isn't fully consistent, but eventually consistent. We chose this setup to speed up the performance, and we can tolerate a few seconds of inconsistency.
The tables are set with TWCS with read-repair disabled, and we don't run full repairs on them
However, we've discovered that some entries of the data are replicated only once, and not twice, which means that when the not-updated node is queried it fails to retrieve the data.
My first question is how could this happen? Shouldn't Cassandra replicate all the data?
Now if we choose to perform repairs, it will create overlapping tombstones, therefore they won't be deleted when their time is up. I'm aware of the unchecked_tombstone_compaction property to ignore the overlap, but I feel like it's a bad approach. Any ideas?
So you've obviously made some deliberate choices regarding your client CL. You've opted to potentially sacrifice consistency for speed. You have achieved your goals, but you assumed that data would always make it to all of the other nodes in the cluster that it belongs. There are no guarantees of that, as you have found out. How could that happen? There are multiple reasons I'm sure, some of which include: networking/issues, hardware overload (I/O, CPU, etc. - which can cause dropped mutations), cassandra/dse being unavailable for whatever reasons, etc.
If none of your nodes have not been "off-line" for at least a few hours (whether it be dse or the host being unavailable), I'm guessing your nodes are dropping mutations, and I would check two things:
1) nodetool tpstats
2) Look through your cassandra logs
For DSE: cat /var/log/cassandra/system.log | grep -i mutation | grep -i drop (and debug.log as well)
I'm guessing you're probably dropping mutations, and the cassandra logs and tpstats will record this (tpstats will only show you since last cassandra/dse restart). If you are dropping mutations, you'll have to try to understand why - typically some sort of load pressure causing it.
I have scheduled 1-second vmstat output that spools to a log continuously with log rotation so I can go back and check a few things out if our nodes start "mis-behaving". It could help.
That's where I would start. Either way, your decision to use read/write CL=1 has put you in this spot. You may want to reconsider that approach.
Consistency level=1 can create a problem sometimes due to many reasons like if data is not replicating to the cluster properly due to mutations or cluster/node overload or high CPU or high I/O or network problem so in this case you can suffer data inconsistency however read repair handles this problem some times if it is enabled. you can go with manual repair to ensure consistency of the cluster but you can get some zombie data too for your case.
I think, to avoid this kind of issue you should consider CL at least Quorum for write or you should run manual repair within GC_grace_period(default is 10 days) for all the tables in the cluster.
Also, you can use incremental repair so that Cassandra run repair in background for chunk of data. For more details you can refer below link
http://cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/operating/repair.html or https://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/3.0/cassandra/tools/toolsRepair.html

Why do tables get out of sync over time when Write Consistency ALL is used?

Iam running a cassandra 3.11.4 cluster with 1 data center, 2 racks and 11 nodes. My keyspaces and the tables are set to replication 2. I use the Prometheus-Grafana-Combo to monitor the cluster.
Observation: During (massive) inserts using Write-Consistency Level ALL (i.e. 2 nodes) the affected tables/nodes get slowly out of sync (worst case on one node: from 100% to 83% within 6 hours). My expectation is that this could only happen if I use ANY (or anything less than my replication factor).
I would really like to understand this behaviour.
What is also interesting: If I dare to use write consistency ANY I get exactly that- and even though all nodes are online Cassandra does not even seem attempt to write to all nodes. In any case (ANY or ALL) if have to perform incremental repairs.
First of all, your expectation is correct: Writes, regardless of what the consistency-level is (ALL or ONE or ANY or whatever), do make every attempt to write to all replicas. The different write-consistency levels only differ on when "success" is reported to the client: ALL waits until all writes were done, while ONE waits for just one (and does the other ones in the background). So unless one of your nodes goes down, or severely overloaded, none of the writes should be missing on any of the nodes, and there should be zero inconsistencies. The "hinted handoff" feature makes inconsistencies even less likely (if one node is temporarily down, other nodes save for it the writes it missed, and replay them later).
I think your only problem is that you're misinterpreting what the "percentrepaired" statistic means. The "percentrepaired" metric is used by incremental repair. In incremental repair, data on disk is split between "repaired" data (data that already went through a repair process) and "unrepaired" data - new data that still did not yes pass through repair. This does not mean that the new data is inconsistent or differs between nodes - it just that nobody checked that yet! To mark this new data "repaired" you'd need to run an (incremental) repair - it will realize the data does not differ between nodes, and mark it as "repaired".

Cassandra, removing old, not needed data

I have a two-node Cassandra cluster, with RF of 2. So both nodes contain 100% of data.
Now, I am running short on disk space. I can remove some old data, since they were aggregated and processed before, and I don't need them anymore.
I tried running a delete query from cqlsh, but I get a timeout. I tried increasing timeouts, but it seems that running a query from cqlsh will take much more time.
How can I disable this timeout for a single query or connection? Is there any other way, besides increasing timeout, to remove some data from a node?
My Cassandra version is 3.11.0.
PS. I increases write_request_timeout_in_ms in cassandra.yaml. Is this the correct one for delete queries?
Deletes really shouldn't timeout unless there is a problem related to something else. Its inserting a tombstone with no reads or anything and should be fast/cheap regardless of what exists already. Reading on other hand can be impacted a lot. I would guess GC related problems related to reads. You could check GC logs and maybe increase heap and reduce CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction (if using cms and not g1).
So check GC and normal logs for issues (look for WARN, ERROR in system log) and at pause times in gc logs >1 second, there should be none.
After issuing delete you could try to do a force compaction (nodetool compact keyspace table) to see if it helps disk space. The delete by itself will not reduce disk space until the data has been compacted with the tombstone.
write_request_timeout_in_ms is the right setting, but if your hitting it something is wrong and your just masking it. It should really take less than 1 millisecond normal use.
Side note: RF=2 on a 2 node cluster is not how C* is designed to run. You have no availability on a database that sacrificed consistency for high availability.

how to extend metrics of cassandra

there is a multicenter cassandra environment.
and set the consistency-level=local_quorum.
I want to know the latency of the local datacenter and other datacenter.
What I mean is when a data is writen successfully,and what's the time that other datacenter can have the replica.
this metrics is not exposed by cassandra.
Have found that writelatency is collected in org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageProxy.mutate method.
and want to add code in there to achieve collecting the latency of datacenter.
but the problem is cassandra write finish when the num of write consistency-level success,I cannot block the write transaction.
how to keep the sync between
write memtable and
write merics
have no idea going on.anybody have idea on achieving this,pls help a look.
There isnt anything available at this time directly, there is a ticket with patch available at CASSANDRA-11569 though.
There are some tricks you can try in mean time.
If you enable trace on a query (CL.ALL) you can check the trace events table to see the time that the mutations left coordinator and when it arrives on the replica.
You can make a local quorum write query, then a each quorum write query and track difference.
Theres a problem with some of these metrics in tracking mutations. Cassandra will piggyback all the writes in that DC over a single proxy write (vs coordinator actually sending to each node). If that node hits a GC it is likely to get a spike. Speculative retry will help with that affecting latency in an extreme case but then your not really tracking your raw cross dc latency. May want to just consider "ping".

Cassandra Compaction takes all the resources and leads to node failure

I met very strange problem during testing cassandra. I have a very simple column family that stores video data (keys point to time period and there is only one column containing ~2MB video for this period).
Use Case
I start to load data using Hector API (round-robin) to 6 empty nodes (8GB RAM for Cassandra)- load is run in 4 threads adding 4 rows in second for each thread.
After a while (running load for hour or so) near 100-200 GB are added to the node (depending on the replication factor) and then one or several nodes become unreachable. (no pinging just reboot helps)
Why Compaction
I do use tiered-level compaction and monitoring the system(Debian) i can see that it actually not writes but compaction that takes almost all resources (disk, memory) and cause server to refuse writes and than fail.
After like 30-40 minutes of test compaction tasks just cannot be handled and get queued. Interesting thing is that there are no deletes and updates - so compaction just reads/writes data again and again without bringing actual value to me (like it can be compacted once in the evening).
When i slow down the pace - i.e running 2 threads with 1 second delay things go better but whether it still be working when i have 20TB not 100 GB on a node.
Is Cassandra optimized for such type of workload? How the resources are normally distributed between compaction and reads/writes?
Update
Update of network driver solved problem with unreachable cluster
Thanks,
Sergey.
Cassandra will use up to in_memory_compaction_limit_in_mb memory for a compaction. It is routine to have compaction running while reads and writes are served simultaneously. It is also normal that compaction can fall behind if you continue to throw writes at it as fast as possible; if your read workload requires that compaction be up to date or close to it at all times, then you'll need a larger cluster to spread the load around more machines.
Recommended amount of disk per node for online queries is up to 500GB, maybe 1TB if you're pushing it. Remember that this amount of data will have to be rebuilt if a node fails. Typical Cassandra workloads are CPU-bound or iops-bound, not disk-space bound, so you won't be able to make good use of that space anyway.
(It's also possible to do batch analytics against Cassandra, which we do with the Cassandra Filesystem, in which case higher disk:cpu ratios are desirable, but we use a custom compaction strategy for that as well.)
It's not clear from your report why a server would become unreachable. This is really an OS-level problem. (Are you swapping? Disabling swap would be a good first step.)

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