Decommission cassandra node times out with "received only 0 responses" - cassandra

Question

When I try to decommission a node in my Cassandra cluster, the process starts (I see active streams flowing from the node to decommission to the other nodes in the cluster (using vnodes)), but then after a little delay nodetool decommission exists with the following error message.
I can repeatedly run nodetool decommission and it will start streaming data to other nodes, but so far always exists with the below error.
Why am I seeing this, and is there a way I can safely decommission this node?
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: org.apache.cassandra.exceptions.ReadTimeoutException: Operation timed out - received only 0 responses.
at org.apache.cassandra.db.HintedHandOffManager.getHintsSlice(HintedHandOffManager.java:578)
at org.apache.cassandra.db.HintedHandOffManager.listEndpointsPendingHints(HintedHandOffManager.java:528)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.streamHints(StorageService.java:2854)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.unbootstrap(StorageService.java:2834)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.decommission(StorageService.java:2795)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.StandardMBeanIntrospector.invokeM2(StandardMBeanIntrospector.java:93)
at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.StandardMBeanIntrospector.invokeM2(StandardMBeanIntrospector.java:27)
at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.MBeanIntrospector.invokeM(MBeanIntrospector.java:208)
at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.PerInterface.invoke(PerInterface.java:120)
at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.MBeanSupport.invoke(MBeanSupport.java:262)
at com.sun.jmx.interceptor.DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.invoke(DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.java:836)
at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.JmxMBeanServer.invoke(JmxMBeanServer.java:761)
at javax.management.remote.rmi.RMIConnectionImpl.doOperation(RMIConnectionImpl.java:1454)
at javax.management.remote.rmi.RMIConnectionImpl.access$300(RMIConnectionImpl.java:74)
at javax.management.remote.rmi.RMIConnectionImpl$PrivilegedOperation.run(RMIConnectionImpl.java:1295)
at javax.management.remote.rmi.RMIConnectionImpl.doPrivilegedOperation(RMIConnectionImpl.java:1387)
at javax.management.remote.rmi.RMIConnectionImpl.invoke(RMIConnectionImpl.java:818)
at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor28.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at sun.rmi.server.UnicastServerRef.dispatch(UnicastServerRef.java:303)
at sun.rmi.transport.Transport$1.run(Transport.java:159)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at sun.rmi.transport.Transport.serviceCall(Transport.java:155)
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport.handleMessages(TCPTransport.java:535)
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport$ConnectionHandler.run0(TCPTransport.java:790)
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport$ConnectionHandler.run(TCPTransport.java:649)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)
Caused by: org.apache.cassandra.exceptions.ReadTimeoutException: Operation timed out - received only 0 responses.
at org.apache.cassandra.service.ReadCallback.get(ReadCallback.java:100)
at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageProxy.getRangeSlice(StorageProxy.java:1213)
at org.apache.cassandra.db.HintedHandOffManager.getHintsSlice(HintedHandOffManager.java:573)
... 33 more

Answer 1

The hinted handoff manager is checking for hints to see if it needs to pass those off during
the decommission so that the hints don't get lost. You most likely have a lot of hints, or
a bunch of tombstones, or something in the table causing the query to timeout. You aren't
seeing any other exceptions in your logs before the timeout are you? Raising the read timeout
period on your nodes before you decommission them, or manually deleting the hints CF, should
most likely get your past this. If you delete them, you would then want to make sure you
ran a full cluster repair when you are done with all of your decommissions, to propagate data
from any hints you deleted.

Answer 2

The short answer is that the node I was trying to decommission was underpowered for the amount of data it held. As of this writing there seems to be a reasonable hard minimum of resources needed to handle nodes with arbitrary amounts of data, which seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of what an AWS i2.2xlarge provides. In particular, the old m1 instances let you get into trouble by allowing you to store far more data on each node than the memory and compute resources available can support on it.