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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T15:47:43+00:00

Will frequent Compaction and Memtable Flushing affect write latency of the cluster? In our

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Will frequent Compaction and Memtable Flushing affect write latency of the cluster?

In our implementation we have a bunch of Counter Column Families [about 30] which gets updated very actively. Every request to our system does around 15-20 updates[all diff CFs].

We are able to notice Compaction and Flushing happening very frequently in our system logs of cassandra on heavy traffic. And By the time we also experience high load on nodes responsible for the keys [Day Timestamp, Minute Timestamp, Hour Timestamp] and write latency of the cluster increases than usual [0.6 ms to 26 ms]

We haven’t touched any of the defaults of cassandra and our machines running cassandra have reasonably good enough configuration[32G ram and 16 Cores] 4G to cassandra

We tried disabling durable_writes to know whether it helps but it didn’t do that much good as we expected

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  1. Editorial Team

    Short version: if Cassandra is configured as recommended with commitlog on a separate disk from the data directories, then flush and compaction should have negligible impact.

    Caveats:

    Updates are primarily CPU-bound, and compaction takes a lot of CPU. If you are running on machines or VMs with less than 4 cores [not your situation, but for the sake of completeness] you might want to reduce compaction_throughput_mb_per_sec to throttle it down.

    If you have enough CFs flushing all at the same time (which it sounds like may be the case with updating 2/3 of your CFs with each request) then Cassandra may block writes temporarily to make sure that it’s not accepting writes faster than it can flush them (which could otherwise eventually result in running out of memory and dying). 4 GB is a relatively small heap for high volume inserts across many CFs; I’d suggest increasing that to 8. It’s also worth enabling the JVM GC logging to see how hard the JVM is having to work — example settings are in cassandra-env.sh.

    Finally, you don’t mention the Cassandra version you are using but performance has reliably increased with each major release. Especially if you are using something older than 0.8, I would recommend upgrading.

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