Cassandra dead but pid file exists - cassandra

Question

I have novice to cassandra and tried my hands to install cassandra-2.1.2 on centos 7.0.
After complete installation execute cqlsh command and created few keyspace(s) and column family.
Which seems to me in first glance its working perfectly.
But later onwards i realized below issues:
1- when i execute "service cassandra status" command, i got below error:
Output:Cassandra dead but pid file exists.
I googled the above issue and found some links
http://www.datastax.com/support-forums/topic/dse-dead-but-pid-file-exists
https://baioradba.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/how-to-install-cassandra-on-centos-6-5/
and found that I had same configuration mentioned in above links but the same error still persists.
Please tell me the root cause and how to resolve it.
2- Second issue is in the cassandra.log file.
When I analysed the cassandra.log file there was an expection as :
Expecting URI in variable: [cassandra.config]. Please prefix the file with file:/// for local files or file://<server>/ for remote files. Aborting.
Below is the complete log:
12:01:40.816 [main] ERROR o.a.c.config.DatabaseDescriptor - Fatal configuration error
org.apache.cassandra.exceptions.ConfigurationException: Expecting URI in variable: [cassandra.config]. Please prefix the file with file:/// for local files or file://<server>/ for remote files. Aborting.
at org.apache.cassandra.config.YamlConfigurationLoader.getStorageConfigURL(YamlConfigurationLoader.java:73) ~[apache-cassandra-2.1.3.jar:2.1.3]
at org.apache.cassandra.config.YamlConfigurationLoader.loadConfig(YamlConfigurationLoader.java:84) ~[apache-cassandra-2.1.3.jar:2.1.3]
at org.apache.cassandra.config.DatabaseDescriptor.loadConfig(DatabaseDescriptor.java:158) ~[apache-cassandra-2.1.3.jar:2.1.3]
at org.apache.cassandra.config.DatabaseDescriptor.<clinit>(DatabaseDescriptor.java:133) ~[apache-cassandra-2.1.3.jar:2.1.3]
at org.apache.cassandra.service.CassandraDaemon.setup(CassandraDaemon.java:110) [apache-cassandra-2.1.3.jar:2.1.3]
at org.apache.cassandra.service.CassandraDaemon.activate(CassandraDaemon.java:465) [apache-cassandra-2.1.3.jar:2.1.3]
at org.apache.cassandra.service.CassandraDaemon.main(CassandraDaemon.java:554) [apache-cassandra-2.1.3.jar:2.1.3]
Expecting URI in variable: [cassandra.config]. Please prefix the file with file:/// for local files or file://<server>/ for remote files. Aborting.
Fatal configuration error; unable to start. See log for stacktrace.
I again searched the same issue in google and but the links were not that useful as they contained the java class code for cassandra.config .
Again please tell the root cause and how to resolve it?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

rm /var/run/cassandra.pid
Run ps -ef | grep cassandra
Kill the pid of the cassandra process.
Start cassandra

Answer 2

fix this issue, Edit the cassandra-env.sh:
sudo vi /etc/cassandra/conf/cassandra-env.sh
increase heap size for cassandra .. this should resolve your issue

Answer 3

Check if you have enough memory to start cassandra service with this command:
cat /proc/meminfo
I was running Hortonworks VM with Virtualbox, and I had a lot of Hadoop components started which needed a lot of memory, so for me the solution was to stop unnecessary Hadoop components and add some extra memory to the virtual machine.

Answer 4

From https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/cassandra-2.1/examples/client_only/README.txt#L43-L49 :
cassandra.yaml can be on the classpath as is done here, can be
specified (by modifying the script) in a location within the classpath
like this: java -Xmx1G
-Dcassandra.config=/path/in/classpath/to/cassandra.yaml ... or can be retrieved from a location outside the classpath like this: ...
-Dcassandra.config=file:///path/to/cassandra.yaml ... or ... -Dcassandra.config=http://awesomesauce.com/cassandra.yaml ...
So you probably had a misconfigured startup option.

Answer 5

Remove the pid file. Try
rm /var/run/cassandra.pid