Scylla Summit 2019

28 December 2019, 12:00 am by Ultrabug

I've had the pleasure to attend again and present at the Scylla Summit in San Francisco and the honor to be awarded the...

Scylla: four ways to optimize your disk space consumption

29 March 2019, 12:00 am by Ultrabug

We recently had to face free disk space outages on some of our scylla clusters and we learnt some very interesting things while outlining some improvements t...

Scylla Summit 2018 write-up

6 December 2018, 12:00 am by Ultrabug

It's been almost one month since I had the chance to attend and speak at Scylla Summit 2018 so I'm reliev...

Authenticating and connecting to a SSL enabled Scylla cluster using Spark 2

19 July 2018, 12:00 am by Ultrabug

This quick article is a wrap up for reference on how to connect to ScyllaDB using Spark 2 when authentication and SSL are enforced for the clients on the...

A botspot story

6 July 2018, 12:00 am by Ultrabug

I felt like sharing a recent story that allowed us identify a bot in a haystack thanks to Scylla.

...

Evaluating ScyllaDB for production 2/2

28 February 2018, 12:00 am by Ultrabug

In my previous blog post, I shared [7 lessons on our experience in evaluating Scylla](https://www.ultrabug.fr...

Evaluating ScyllaDB for production 1/2

23 January 2018, 12:00 am by Ultrabug

I have recently been conducting a quite deep evaluation of ScyllaDB to find out if we could benefit from this database in some of...

Enhance Apache Cassandra Logging

22 September 2015, 11:00 am by Alteroot:~# - cassandra

Cassandra usually output all its logs in a system.log file. It uses log4j old 1.2 version for cassandra 2.0, and since 2.1, logback, which of course use different syntax :)
Logs can be enhanced with some configuration. These explanations works with Cassandra 2.0.x and Cassandra 2.1.x, I haven’t tested others versions yet.

I wanted to split logs in different files, depending on their “sources” (repair, compaction, tombstones etc), to ease debugging, while keeping the system.log as usual.

For example, to declare 2 new files to handle, say Repair and Tombstones logs :

Cassandra 2.0 :

You need to declare each new log files in log4j-server.properties file.

[...]
## Repair
log4j.appender.Repair=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.Repair.maxFileSize=20MB
log4j.appender.Repair.maxBackupIndex=50
log4j.appender.Repair.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.Repair.layout.ConversionPattern=%5p [%t] %d{ISO8601} %F (line %L) %m%n
## Edit the next line to point to your logs directory
log4j.appender.Repair.File=/var/log/cassandra/repair.log

## Tombstones
log4j.appender.Tombstones=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.Tombstones.maxFileSize=20MB
log4j.appender.Tombstones.maxBackupIndex=50
log4j.appender.Tombstones.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.Tombstones.layout.ConversionPattern=%5p [%t] %d{ISO8601} %F (line %L) %m%n
### Edit the next line to point to your logs directory
log4j.appender.Tombstones.File=/home/log/cassandra/tombstones.log

Cassandra 2.1 :

It is in the logback.xml file.

  <appender name="Repair" class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.RollingFileAppender">
    <file>${cassandra.logdir}/repair.log</file>
    <rollingPolicy class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.FixedWindowRollingPolicy">
      <fileNamePattern>${cassandra.logdir}/system.log.%i.zip</fileNamePattern>
      <minIndex>1</minIndex>
      <maxIndex>20</maxIndex>
    </rollingPolicy>

    <triggeringPolicy class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.SizeBasedTriggeringPolicy">
      <maxFileSize>20MB</maxFileSize>
    </triggeringPolicy>
    <encoder>
      <pattern>%-5level [%thread] %date{ISO8601} %F:%L - %msg%n</pattern>
      <!-- old-style log format
      <pattern>%5level [%thread] %date{ISO8601} %F (line %L) %msg%n</pattern>
      -->
    </encoder>
  </appender>

  <appender name="Tombstones" class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.RollingFileAppender">
    <file>${cassandra.logdir}/tombstones.log</file>
    <rollingPolicy class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.FixedWindowRollingPolicy">
      <fileNamePattern>${cassandra.logdir}/tombstones.log.%i.zip</fileNamePattern>
      <minIndex>1</minIndex>
      <maxIndex>20</maxIndex>
    </rollingPolicy>

    <triggeringPolicy class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.SizeBasedTriggeringPolicy">
      <maxFileSize>20MB</maxFileSize>
    </triggeringPolicy>
    <encoder>
      <pattern>%-5level [%thread] %date{ISO8601} %F:%L - %msg%n</pattern>
      <!-- old-style log format
      <pattern>%5level [%thread] %date{ISO8601} %F (line %L) %msg%n</pattern>
      -->
    </encoder>
  </appender>

Now that theses new files are declared, we need to fill them with logs. To do that, simply redirect some Java class to the good file. To redirect the class org.apache.cassandra.db.filter.SliceQueryFilter, loglevel WARN to the Tombstone file, simply add :

Cassandra 2.0 :

log4j.logger.org.apache.cassandra.db.filter.SliceQueryFilter=WARN,Tombstones

Cassandra 2.1 :

<logger name="org.apache.cassandra.db.filter.SliceQueryFilter" level="WARN">
    <appender-ref ref="Tombstones"/>
</logger>

It’s a on-the-fly configuration, so no need to restart Cassandra !
Now you will have dedicated files for each kind of logs.

A list of interesting Cassandra classes :

org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService, WARN : Repair
org.apache.cassandra.net.OutboundTcpConnection, DEBUG : Repair (haha, theses fucking stuck repair)
org.apache.cassandra.repair, INFO : Repair
org.apache.cassandra.db.HintedHandOffManager, DEBUG : Repair
org.apache.cassandra.streaming.StreamResultFuture, DEBUG : Repair 
org.apache.cassandra.cql3.statements.BatchStatement, WARN : Statements
org.apache.cassandra.db.filter.SliceQueryFilter, WARN : Tombstones

You can find from which java class a log message come from by adding “%c” in log4j/logback “ConversionPattern” :

org.apache.cassandra.db.ColumnFamilyStore INFO  [BatchlogTasks:1] 2015-09-18 16:43:48,261 ColumnFamilyStore.java:939 - Enqueuing flush of batchlog: 226172 (0%) on-heap, 0 (0%) off-heap
org.apache.cassandra.db.Memtable INFO  [MemtableFlushWriter:4213] 2015-09-18 16:43:48,262 Memtable.java:347 - Writing Memtable-batchlog@1145616338(195.566KiB serialized bytes, 205 ops, 0%/0% of on/off-heap limit)
org.apache.cassandra.db.Memtable INFO  [MemtableFlushWriter:4213] 2015-09-18 16:43:48,264 Memtable.java:393 - Completed flushing /home/cassandra/data/system/batchlog/system-batchlog-tmp-ka-4267-Data.db; nothing needed to be retained.  Commitlog position was ReplayPosition(segmentId=1442331704273, position=17281204)

You can disable “additivity” (i.e avoid adding messages in system.log for example) in log4j for a specific class by adding :

log4j.additivity.org.apache.cassandra.db.filter.SliceQueryFilter=false

For logback, you can add additivity=”false” to <logger .../> elements.

To migrate from log4j logs to logback.xml, you can look at http://logback.qos.ch/translator/

Sources :

Note: you can add http://blog.alteroot.org/feed.cassandra.xml to your rss aggregator to follow all my Cassandra posts :)

How to change Cassandra compaction strategy on a production cluster

20 April 2015, 10:00 am by Alteroot:~# - cassandra

I’ll talk about changing Cassandra CompactionStrategy on a live production Cluster.
First of all, an extract of the Cassandra documentation :

Periodic compaction is essential to a healthy Cassandra database because Cassandra does not insert/update in place. As inserts/updates occur, instead of overwriting the rows, Cassandra writes a new timestamped version of the inserted or updated data in another SSTable. Cassandra manages the accumulation of SSTables on disk using compaction. Cassandra also does not delete in place because the SSTable is immutable. Instead, Cassandra marks data to be deleted using a tombstone.

By default, Cassandra use SizeTieredCompactionStrategyi (STC). This strategy triggers a minor compaction when there are a number of similar sized SSTables on disk as configured by the table subproperty, 4 by default.

Another compaction strategy available since Cassandra 1.0 is LeveledCompactionStrategy (LCS) based on LevelDB.
Since 2.0.11, DateTieredCompactionStrategy is also available.

Depending on your needs, you may need to change the compaction strategy on a running cluster. Change this setting involves rewrite ALL sstables to the new strategy, which may take long time and can be cpu / i/o intensive.

I needed to change the compaction strategy on my production cluster to LeveledCompactionStrategy because of our workflow : lot of updates and deletes, wide rows etc.
Moreover, with the default STC, progressively the largest SSTable that is created will not be compacted until the amount of actual data increases four-fold. So it can take long time before old data are really deleted !

Note: You can test a new compactionStrategy on one new node with the write_survey bootstrap option. See the datastax blogpost about it.

The basic procedure to change the CompactionStrategy is to alter the table via cql :

cqlsh> ALTER TABLE mykeyspace.mytable  WITH compaction = { 'class' :  'LeveledCompactionStrategy'  };

If you run alter table to change to LCS like that, all nodes will recompact data at the same time, so performances problems can occurs for hours/days…

A better solution is to migrate nodes by nodes !

You need to change the compaction locally on-the-fly, via the JMX, like in write_survey mode.
I use jmxterm for that. I think I’ll write articles about all theses jmx things :)
For example, to change to LCS on mytable table with jmxterm :

~ java -jar jmxterm-1.0-alpha-4-uber.jar --url instance1:7199                                                      
Welcome to JMX terminal. Type "help" for available commands.
$>domain org.apache.cassandra.db
#domain is set to org.apache.cassandra.db
$>bean org.apache.cassandra.db:columnfamily=mytable,keyspace=mykeyspace,type=ColumnFamilies
#bean is set to org.apache.cassandra.db:columnfamily=mytable,keyspace=mykeyspace,type=ColumnFamilies
$>get CompactionStrategyClass
#mbean = org.apache.cassandra.db:columnfamily=mytable,keyspace=mykeyspace,type=ColumnFamilies:
CompactionStrategyClass = org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.SizeTieredCompactionStrategy;
$>set CompactionStrategyClass "org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.LeveledCompactionStrategy" 
#Value of attribute CompactionStrategyClass is set to "org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.LeveledCompactionStrategy"

A nice one-liner :

~ echo "set -b org.apache.cassandra.db:columnfamily=mytable,keyspace=mykeyspace,type=ColumnFamilies CompactionStrategyClass org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.LeveledCompactionStrategy" | java -jar jmxterm-1.0-alpha-4-uber.jar --url instance1:7199

On next commitlog flush, the node will start it compaction to rewrite all it mytable sstables to the new strategy.

You can see the progression with nodetool :

~ nodetool compactionstats
pending tasks: 48
compaction type        keyspace           table       completed           total      unit  progress
Compaction        mykeyspace       mytable      4204151584     25676012644     bytes    16.37%
Active compaction remaining time :   0h23m30s

You need to wait for the node to recompact all it sstables, then change the strategy to instance2, etc.
The transition will be done in multiple compactions if you have lots of data. By default new sstables will be 160MB large.

you can monitor you table with nodetool cfstats too :

~ nodetool cfstats mykeyspace.mytable
[...]
Pending Tasks: 0
        Table: sort
        SSTable count: 31
        SSTables in each level: [31/4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[...]

You can see the 31/4 : it means that there is 31 sstables in L0, whereas cassandra try to have only 4 in L0.

Taken from the code ( src/java/org/apache/cassandra/db/compaction/LeveledManifest.java )

[...]
// L0: 988 [ideal: 4]
// L1: 117 [ideal: 10]
// L2: 12  [ideal: 100]
[...]

When all nodes have the new strategy, let’s go for the global alter table. /!\ If a node restart before the final alter table, it will recompact to default strategy (SizeTiered)!

~ cqlsh 
cqlsh> ALTER TABLE mykeyspace.mytable  WITH compaction = { 'class' :  'LeveledCompactionStrategy'  };

Et voilà, I hope this article will help you :)

My latest Cassandra blogpost was one year ago… I have several in mind (jmx things !) so stay tuned !

Replace a dead node in Cassandra

11 March 2014, 11:00 pm by Alteroot:~# - cassandra

Note (June 2020): this article is old and not really revelant anymore. If you use a modern version of cassandra, look at -Dcassandra.replace_address_first_boot option !

I want to share some tips about my experimentations with Cassandra (version 2.0.x).

I found some documentations on datastax website about replacing a dead node, but it is not suitable for our needs, because in case of hardware crash, we will set up a new node with exactly the same IP (replace “in place”). Update : the documentation in now up to date on datastax !

If you try to start the new node with the same IP, cassandra doesn’t start with :

java.lang.RuntimeException: A node with address /10.20.10.2 already exists, cancelling join. Use cassandra.replace_address if you want to replace this node.

So, we need to use the “cassandra.replace_address” directive (which is not really documented ? :() See this commit and this bug report, available since 1.2.11/2.0.0, it’s an easier solution and it works.

+    - New replace_address to supplant the (now removed) replace_token and
+      replace_node workflows to replace a dead node in place.  Works like the
+      old options, but takes the IP address of the node to be replaced.

It’s a JVM directive, so we can add it at the end of /etc/cassandra/cassandra-env.sh (debian package), for example:

JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Dcassandra.replace_address=10.20.10.2"

Of course, 10.20.10.2 = ip of your dead/new node.

Now, start cassandra, and in logs you will see :

INFO [main] 2014-03-10 14:58:17,804 StorageService.java (line 941) JOINING: schema complete, ready to bootstrap
INFO [main] 2014-03-10 14:58:17,805 StorageService.java (line 941) JOINING: waiting for pending range calculation
INFO [main] 2014-03-10 14:58:17,805 StorageService.java (line 941) JOINING: calculation complete, ready to bootstrap
INFO [main] 2014-03-10 14:58:17,805 StorageService.java (line 941) JOINING: Replacing a node with token(s): [...]
[...]
INFO [main] 2014-03-10 14:58:17,844 StorageService.java (line 941) JOINING: Starting to bootstrap...
INFO [main] 2014-03-10 14:58:18,551 StreamResultFuture.java (line 82) [Stream #effef960-6efe-11e3-9a75-3f94ec5476e9] Executing streaming plan for Bootstrap

Node is in boostraping mode and will retrieve data from cluster. This may take lots of time.
If the node is a seed node, a warning will indicate that the node did not auto bootstrap. This is normal, you need to run a nodetool repair on the node.

On the new node :

# nodetools netstats

Mode: JOINING
Bootstrap effef960-6efe-11e3-9a75-3f94ec5476e9
    /10.20.10.1
        Receiving 102 files, 17467071157 bytes total
[...]

After some time, you will see some informations on logs !
On the new node :

 INFO [STREAM-IN-/10.20.10.1] 2014-03-10 15:15:40,363 StreamResultFuture.java (line 215) [Stream #effef960-6efe-11e3-9a75-3f94ec5476e9] All sessions completed
 INFO [main] 2014-03-10 15:15:40,366 StorageService.java (line 970) Bootstrap completed! for the tokens [...]
[...]
 INFO [main] 2014-03-10 15:15:40,412 StorageService.java (line 1371) Node /10.20.10.2 state jump to normal
 WARN [main] 2014-03-10 15:15:40,413 StorageService.java (line 1378) Not updating token metadata for /10.20.30.51 because I am replacing it
 INFO [main] 2014-03-10 15:15:40,419 StorageService.java (line 821) Startup completed! Now serving reads.

And on other nodes :

 INFO [GossipStage:1] 2014-03-10 15:15:40,625 StorageService.java (line 1371) Node /10.20.10.2 state jump to normal

Et voilà, dead node has been replaced !
Don’t forget to REMOVE modifications on cassandra-env.sh after the complete bootstrap !

Enjoy !