nodetool compact

Forces a major compaction on one or more tables or user-defined compaction on given SSTables.

Major compactions may behave differently depending which compaction strategy is used for the affected tables.

See How is data maintained? and Configure compaction.

A major compaction incurs considerably more disk I/O than minor compactions.

Synopsis

nodetool [<connection_options>] compact
[-et <end_token>] [-s] [-st <start_token>] [--user-defined]
[--] [<keyspace> <tables> [<tables> ...] | <sstable_name> ...]

Definition

If a parameter has multiple forms, the following reference provides both the short form and long form, separated by a comma.

Connection options

-h, --host hostname: The hostname or IP address of a remote node or nodes. When omitted, the default is the local machine.
-p, --port jmx_port: The JMX port number.
-pw, --password jmxpassword: The JMX password for authenticating with secure JMX. If a password is not provided, you are prompted to enter one.
-pwf, --password-file jmx_password_filepath: The filepath to the file that stores JMX authentication credentials.
-u, --username jmx_username: The username for authenticating with secure JMX.

Command arguments

--: Separates an option from an argument that could be mistaken for an option.
-et, --end-token end_token: The token at which the range ends. Requires start token (-st).
keyspace_name: The keyspace name.
-s, --split-output: Do not create a single large file. Split output when using SizeTieredCompactionStrategy (STCS) to files that are 50%-25%-12.5% and so on of the total size. Ignored for DTCS.

nodetool compact -s only accepts keyspace table as an option. The command only works for the entire set of files in the table directory.

compact -s cannot be run on single sstable files; it can only be run on entire tables.

When you compact a table with indexes, HCD does not automatically compact the index SSTables.

To remove tombstones from a table’s indexes, run the following:

nodetool compact -s KEYSPACE_NAME TABLE_NAME.INDEX_NAME

Replace the following:

KEYSPACE_NAME: The name of the keyspace
TABLE_NAME: The name of the table
INDEX_NAME: The name of the index

After running nodetool rebuild_index, old index files remain alongside new index files. Run the following to remove the old files and complete the cleanup:

nodetool compact -s KEYSPACE_NAME TABLE_NAME.INDEX_NAME