Recommended production settings for Windows

Recommendations for production environments.

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

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.

Set ExecutionPolicy to unrestricted 

From Windows PowerShell, set the execution policy to unrestricted from an elevated command-prompt:
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Disable page file 

Because Cassandra has multiple replicas and transparent failover, it is preferable for a replica to be killed immediately when memory is low rather than go into swap. This allows traffic to be immediately redirected to a functioning replica instead of continuing to hit the replica that has high latency due to swapping. If your system has a lot of DRAM, swapping still lowers performance significantly because the OS swaps out executable code so that more DRAM is available for caching disks.

For example, to disable page-file on Windows 7:
  1. From Start, select Control Panel > System and Security > System.
  2. In Control Panel Home, select Advanced system settings.
  3. In System Properties, select Advanced > Performance Settings
  4. In Performance Options, select Advanced > Virtual memory > Change.
  5. In Virtual memory, clear No paging file.

Power profile 

Set the Power profile to High performance.

For example, to disable page-file on Windows 7:
  1. From Start, select Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options.
  2. In Select a power plan, select High performance.