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Thursday 29 March 2012

Issues Faced With Cassandra.

Below I have mentioned some of the issues that I have faced with Cassandra cluster of 24 and 36 nodes running Cassandra-0.8.2.We have this cluster hosted on Amazons EC2 . Each Cassndra node is runnig OS Ubuntu lucid with 16GiB of RAM and 1TB of EBS storage.

1)    Some of the nodes are unreachable even if all Cassandra processes are running.

All the nodes in the cluster are up and running. It shows “Up” status in Ring and on all the nodes Cassandra processes are running still when we do “describe cluster”  It shows some of the nodes unreachable.

·         We figured out this issue during the data loading with sstableloader . As these nodes are unreachable sstableloader is not able to load the data. Not able to figure out proper cause and solution for this, but may be because of heavy load or I/O these nodes do not respond. Once the Cassandra is restarted on these nodes and they become reachable.

2)    Streaming get stuck while increasing Cassandra cluster capacity.

Unable To add nodes to existing Cassandra cluster.When we were doubling Cassandra cluster capacity from 6 nodes to 12 nodes . Some nodes stopped streaming after some time and were not  able to make any progress.

·         While increasing cluster capacity we introduces new nodes with “autobootstrap = true” in ‘cassandra .yaml ‘.This results into new nodes streaming data from surrounding nodes. Very first things you can always stop this streaming, clean data directories and restart node. There is no data loss.
·         You can check into logs for cause of issue. In our case it was a version mismatch error.We had upgraded the Cassandra from 0.7.2 to 0.8.2. But the data for some column families which we are loading directly from hadoop job was not upgraded and these column families were causing problem. So we ran “nodetool scrub” on these column families for all the 6 old nodes and then started streaming.
                                      

3)    sstableloader  get stuck after loading some amount of data.

All nodes are up and running, with up status in ring and reachable with describe cluster still loader is not able to load data or get stuck after loading some amount of data.

·         Recently I am experiencing this issue and data load on all machines are up to 700GB.
·      Not able to figure out the cause and solution for this issue, But it seems very difficult to figure out which nodes are creating problem.

4)    nodetool  cleanup corrupting sstables

After adding nodes to cluster it streams data from surrounding nodes.To clean the unnecessary data we need to run “nodetool cleanup” on those nodes .But we have experience that after cleanup sstables on those machines are corrupt.

·         We noticed that the there were always pending task after compaction (minor and major).So we checked logs and it was showing that compaction manager were unable to compact sstables .
·         So only solution for this to rebuild sstables. So ran scrub on all the nodes having corrupt sstables. And  now compaction is running successfully .But all this scrub process is very slow and you should not load data to Cassandra while scrub is in progress.

5)    Compaction and scrub is not getting triggered because of error “too many open files”

·         We have experienced this issue because of jna jar was not in place and after adding this jar were able to trigger scrub and compaction.
·         As we were facing issue during compaction (major and minor ) the no of sstables on Cassandra machines went high and even after increasing open files limit we were not able to trigger compaction. We have experienced this issue in Cassandra-0.8.2 and as per Cassandra experts this is a bug in and it is fixed in 0.8.10 onwards.
·         We have figured out a temporary solution for this. Load the data on these nodes with minor compaction on. This will reduce the no of sstables and you can trigger the major compaction or scrub.

6)    Dead node always appear in describe cluster
If some of the node is dead and if we cannot have machine with same IP address it is not possible to get rid of this machine and it will always appear in describe  cluster as a unreachable node and won’t allow us to load sstables through sstable loader


·       This is the worst case and looks like a bug in Cassandra 0.8.x. As there is no proper way to remove this node we were deleting location info files from Cassandra followed by restart. This worked for us but a very risky stuff.

7)    Once we trigger a compaction some of nodes were dying with Out Of Memory error.

            From datastax I got
            If nodes are dying with OutOfMemory exceptions, there are four typical reasons for this:

·         A row has grown too large
o    A row cannot exceed 2GB, and must be compacted in memory. The RowWarningThresholdInMB directive will log which rows have exceeded the set threshold. Keep in mind that if you have had nodes down for a period of time, the row that may have grown too large could be due to HintedHandoff.
·         Row cache is too large, or is caching large rows
o    Row cache is generally a high-end optimization. Try disabling it and see if the OOM problems continue.
·         Writes are using ConsistencyLevel.ZERO
o    ConsistencyLevel.ZERO queues writes at the coordinator node and returns instantly. It should generally not be used.
·         The memtable sizes are too large for the amount of heap allocated to the JVM
o    Up to 3 memtables can be resident in memory per ColumnFamily, and adding another 1GB on top of that for Cassandra itself is a good estimate of total heap usage.
In our case I just restarted Cassandra and tried to trigger compaction again and this time also node died with OOM error. So I did restart it and ran scrub for the column family for which I was trying to trigger compaction. After scrub compaction completed successfully.
               




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