Recommended production settings

Recommendations for production environments.

Recommendations for production environments; adjust them accordingly for your implementation.

User resource limits 

You can view the current limits using the ulimit -a command. Although limits can also be temporarily set using this command, DataStax recommends making the changes permanent:

Packaged installs: Ensure that the following settings are included in the /etc/security/limits.d/cassandra.conf file:
cassandra - memlock unlimited
cassandra - nofile 100000
cassandra - nproc 32768
cassandra - as unlimited
Tarball installs: Ensure that the following settings are included in the /etc/security/limits.conf file:
* - memlock unlimited
* - nofile 100000
* - nproc 32768
* - as unlimited
If you run Cassandra as root, some Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, require setting the limits for root explicitly instead of using *:
root - memlock unlimited
root - nofile 100000
root - nproc 32768
root - as unlimited
For CentOS, RHEL, OEL systems, also set the nproc limits in /etc/security/limits.d/90-nproc.conf :
* - nproc 32768
For all installations, add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf :
vm.max_map_count = 1048575
To make the changes take effect, reboot the server or run the following command:
$ sudo sysctl -p
To confirm the limits are applied to the Cassandra process, run the following command where <pid> is the process ID of the currently running Cassandra process:
$ cat /proc/<pid>/limits
For more information, see Insufficient user resource limits errors.

Disable swap 

Disable swap entirely. This prevents the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) from responding poorly because it is buried in swap and ensures that the OS OutOfMemory (OOM) killer does not kill Cassandra.

sudo swapoff --all

To make this change permanent, remove all swap file entries from /etc/fstab.

For more information, see Nodes seem to freeze after some period of time.

Synchronize clocks 

The clocks on all nodes should be synchronized. You can use NTP (Network Time Protocol) or other methods.

This is required because columns are only overwritten if the timestamp in the new version of the column is more recent than the existing column.

Optimum blockdev --setra settings for RAID 

Typically, a readahead of 512 is recommended, especially on Amazon EC2 RAID0 devices.

Check to ensure setra is not set to 65536:

sudo blockdev --report /dev/<device>

To set setra:

sudo blockdev --setra 512 /dev/<device>

Java Virtual Machine 

The latest 64-bit version of Java 6 or 7 is recommended, not the OpenJDK.

Java Native Access 

Java Native Access (JNA) is required for production installations.