Compression

Cassandra’s binary protocol supports optional compression of transport-level requests and responses, for example:

  • a query with its serialized parameters;
  • a page from a result set, i.e. a list of serialized rows.

It reduces network traffic at the cost of CPU overhead, therefore it will likely be beneficial when you have larger payloads.

Two algorithms are available: LZ4 and Snappy. Both rely on third-party libraries, declared by the driver as optional dependencies. So If you use a build tool like Maven, you’ll need to declare an explicit dependency to pull the appropriate library in your application’s classpath. Then you configure compression at driver startup.

LZ4

Maven dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.jpountz.lz4</groupId>
    <artifactId>lz4</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.0</version>
</dependency>

Always check the exact version of the library: go to the driver’s parent POM (change the URL to match your driver version) and look for the lz4.version property.

Driver configuration:

cluster = Cluster.builder()
    .addContactPoint("127.0.0.1")
    .withCompression(ProtocolOptions.Compression.LZ4)
    .build();

LZ4-java has three internal implementations (from fastest to slowest):

  • JNI;
  • pure Java using sun.misc.Unsafe;
  • pure Java using only “safe” classes.

It will pick the best implementation depending on what’s possible on your platform. To find out which one was chosen, enable INFO logs on the category com.datastax.driver.core.FrameCompressor and look for a log similar to this:

INFO  com.datastax.driver.core.FrameCompressor  - Using LZ4Factory:JNI

Snappy

Maven dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.xerial.snappy</groupId>
    <artifactId>snappy-java</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.5</version>
</dependency>

Always check the exact version of the library: go to the driver’s parent POM (change the URL to match your driver version) and look for the snappy.version property.

Driver configuration:

cluster = Cluster.builder()
    .addContactPoint("127.0.0.1")
    .withCompression(ProtocolOptions.Compression.SNAPPY)
    .build();