Cassandra compaction on few nodes is running slowly - cassandra

We want cassandra flush to happen less frequently. In the latest version of apache cassandra memtable_cleanup_threshold has been deprecated. Is there a way we can still put more data in memtable? We also have concurrent_compactors set to 4 and compaction throughput set to 64. but when we run major compaction it still runs only one.

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How often should I run nodetool compact and repair in Cassandra?

We have 14 node cassandra cluster v 3.5.
Can someone enlighten with compact & repair ?
If I am running from one of node, does this needs to be runs from all the nodes in cluster
nodetool compact
I see it is very slow, how often this supposed to be run ?
Same question regarding nodetool repair ( All nodes or certain nodes in cluster)
nodetool repair or
nodetool repair -pr
how often this supposed to be run ?
Compactions are part of the normal operation of Cassandra nodes. They run automatically in the background (otherwise known as minor compactions) and get triggered by each table's defined compaction strategy based on any combination of configured thresholds and compaction sub-properties. This video extract from the DS201 Cassandra Foundations course at the DataStax Academy talks about compactions in more detail.
It is not necessary for an operator/administrator to manually kick off compactions with nodetool compact. In fact, it is not recommended to trigger user-defined compactions (otherwise known as major compactions) because they can create problems down the track like the one I explained in this post -- https://community.datastax.com/questions/6396/.
Repairs on the other hand is something that needs to be managed by a cluster administrator. Since Cassandra has a distributed architecture, it is necessary to run repairs to keep the copies of the data consistent between replicas (Cassandra nodes).
Repairs need to be run at least once every gc_grace_seconds (configured per table). By default, GC grace is 10 days (864000 seconds) so most DB admins run a repair on each node once a week. This short video from the DS210 Cassandra Operations course provides a good overview of Cassandra repairs.
Running a partitioner range repair (with -pr flag) on a node repairs only the data that a node owns so it is necessary to run nodetool repair -pr on each node, one node at a time, until all nodes in the cluster have been repaired. This blog post by Jeremiah Jordan is a good explanation of why this is necessary.
If you're interested, datastax.com/dev has free resources for learning Cassandra. The Cassandra Fundamentals series in particular is a good place to start. It is a collection of short online tutorials where you can quickly learn the basic concepts for free. Cheers!
If I am running from one of node, does this needs to be runs from all the nodes in cluster nodetool compact I see it is very slow, how often this supposed to be run ?
You should not run nodetool compact command generally. Compactions are by default meant to run automatically behind the scene if not disabled. Running compaction manually may create more problems and should be avoided for most of the cases. Auto compactions which run behind the scene should be able to handle your compactions. If you feel your compactions are slow you can tune your compactions by looking after the parameters related to compaction here (Mostly concurrent_compactors and compaction_throughput_mb_per_sec)
Same question regarding nodetool repair ( All nodes or certain nodes
in cluster) nodetool repair or nodetool repair -pr how often this
supposed to be run ?
Repair is a maintenance task which should be run on all then nodes once before each gc_grace_seconds period. For example default gc_grace_seconds is equal to 10 days so it is required to run repair on all the nodes once in this 10 day period. You should schedule your repair to run regularly once in gc_grace_seconds period. Regarding which option to use for running repair. If you are doing it by yourself you should run nodetool repair -pr on all the nodes one by one.

Skipping "nodetool upgradesstables" for time series ttl expiry data in Cassandra upgrade from 2.1 to 3.11

In Cassandra 2.1 cluster, data format is ka and post upgrade to Cassandra 3.11, I see the new sstables are written in md format. For the time-series data that is going to be expired in 3 months time, can I skip running the nodetool upgradesstables?
I validated the data reads are working fine from the older ka format sstables after upgrade. The reason I want to skip the upgrade is from other threads, I know it is going to take a lot of time for format conversion and anyway this data is going to expire in 3 months.
I don't think it's mandatory to run nodetool sstablesupgrade, Cassandra 3 will be able to work with old SSTables, but you lose a lot of advantages of Cassandra 3 (for instance, space consumption is significantly reduced). Also Datastax has a warning in their upgrade documentation:
WARNING: Failure to upgrade SSTables when required results in a significant performance impact and increased disk usage and possible data loss. Upgrading is not complete until the SSTables are upgraded.

removing a node from the cluster and tables in twcs

I have a cluster (tested it both with 2.1.14 and 3.0.17) in which I have a table that is TWCS (time window compaction). All sstables are kept in the correct windows just fine up until I remove a node from the cluster (in the same dc) and in that moment it seems all sstables are treated as one pool for normal size tiered, causing sstables from different time periods to join. Seeing as my cluster is 400 nodes spread over 6 datacenters a node removal is something quite common.
I did not find any bug talking about this, is this expected behavior? having all the sstables handled together causes a major problem space wise since it means new and old data are in the same sstable causing the old data to remain on disk much longer
(2.1 twcs is achieved using a jar from jeffjirsa github)
Have you disabled read repair on TWCS tables? it could inject out-of-sequence timestamps. TWCS itself will do size tiered but only on current window, iff it falls behind in compaction.

Guideline regarding nodetool repair in apache cassandra v3.0.9

We are using Apache-Cassandra v3.0.9 and have 3 DC. We are experiencing continuous troubles while running nodetool repair and most of the time the repair process causes big outages. We have 3 different datacenters consisting of 4, 4 & 15 nodes. The total data is around 200 GB at RF=3 and we are using LCS. The RAM is 16 GB, out of which 6 GB is dedicated as heap. Most of the times we try to run full repair the repair process fails with long GC pauses and node becoming unresponsive. Other than at the time of repair our nodes are good on heap and GC pauses are hardly 300 ms. I have following doubts.
Is it still required to run full repair before gc_grace_seconds or just the incremental repairs are good enough in apache cassandra v3.0.9
Do I need to run incremental sequential repairs on every node of the cluster, any one node of each of the datacenters or just any node of the whole cluster? One-by-one or concurrently?
What are the downsides of repair failing because some nodes became unresponsive/died during the repair process, any steps to take care of before starting another repair session.
What are the downsides of not scheduling repairs at all?
We started our cassandra deployment straight away on version 3.0.9. Is the migration as mentioned on Apache Cassandra documentation still required?
full repair is still needed. incremental repair would split SSTables into "repaired" and "unrepaired" parts and the "repaired" part will not be repaired later and that's why incremental repair is more efficient. However, if there're data corruption in the "repaired" sstables, only full repair can fix that; our experience is to run incremental repair every day and full repair only once per grace period. Also, when you have incremental repair, you can make the grace period longer.
better run incremental repair on each node one by one; you can have a cron job or code a simple scheduler to do that;
repair failure, just run it again; no side effect I know of.
if you don't do repair, as time goes, you data consistency is at danger; Cassandra takes the eventual consistency concept, which means that it doesn't guarantee strong consistency when you write data to it unless you explicitly specify that. repair is very important to guarantee the data in the background are all kept up to date and consistent;
if you run full repair already in your cluster, you shouldn't need to migrate explicitly.

Is it recommended to do periodic cassandra repair

We recently had a disk fail in one of our Cassandra node (its a 5 Cassandra 2.2 cluster with replication factor of 3). It took about a week or more to perform a full repair on that node. Each node contains 3/5 of the data and doing nodetool repair repaired 3/5 of the token ranges across all nodes. Now that its been repaired it will most likely repair faster since it did a incremental repair. I am wondering if its a good idea to perform periodic repairs on all nodes using nodetool repair -pr (We are at 2.2 and I think incremental repair is default in 2.2).
I think its a good idea because if performed periodically it will take less time to repair as it only needs to repair non repaired SStables. We also might've had instances where the nodes may've been down for more than the hinted handoff window and we probably didn't do anything about it.
Yes, its good practice to run scheduled incremental repair. Run repair frequently enough that every node is repaired before reaching the time specified in the gc_grace_seconds setting.
Also, it would be great if you run incremental repair on a frequent basis, combined with full repair less frequently like once per month/week. incremental repair would repair the SSTable which was not marked as repaired before, but full repair could take care more comprehensive case like SSTable rotting. check the reference from datastax:https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/operations/opsRepairNodesWhen.html

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