cassandra on laptop

[Gary Jefferson <ga...@yahoo.com>]

I'm running an underpowered laptop (ubuntu) for development work. Installing Cassandra was easy, and getting the twissandra example app up and working was also easy.

Here's the problem: after about a day of letting it run (with no load generated to webapp or db), my laptop now becomes unresponsive. If I'm patient, I can shutdown the cassandra service and return things to normal. In each of these cases, the cassandra process is eating up almost all memory, and everything goes to swap.

I can't develop against Cassandra in this environment. I know it isn't set up by default to work efficiently on a meager laptop, but are there some common setting somewhere that I can just tweak to make life not be so miserable? I just want to play with it and try it out for this project I'm working on, but that's impractical with default settings. I'm going to have to flee to mongodb or something not as good...

I'm also a little nervous about this running on a server now -- I've read enough to understand that by default it's set up to eat lots of memory, and I'm fine with that... but it just lends itself to all the java bigotry that some of us accumulate over the years.

Anyway, if someone can give me a pointer on how to set up to run on a laptop in a development setting, big thanks.

Thanks!
Gary

Re: cassandra on laptop

[Peter Sanford <ps...@nearbuysystems.com>]

By default, Cassandra is configured to use half the ram of your
system. That's way overkill for playing around with it on a laptop.
Edit /etc/cassandra/cassandra-env.sh and set max_heap_size_in_mb to
something more suited for your environment.

I have it set to 256M for my laptop (with 4G of ram). This works just
fine for light development tasks and for running our test suite.

-psanford

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 1:44 PM, Gary Jefferson
<ga...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm running an underpowered laptop (ubuntu) for development work. Installing Cassandra was easy, and getting the twissandra example app up and working was also easy.
>
> Here's the problem: after about a day of letting it run (with no load generated to webapp or db), my laptop now becomes unresponsive. If I'm patient, I can shutdown the cassandra service and return things to normal. In each of these cases, the cassandra process is eating up almost all memory, and everything goes to swap.
>
> I can't develop against Cassandra in this environment. I know it isn't set up by default to work efficiently on a meager laptop, but are there some common setting somewhere that I can just tweak to make life not be so miserable? I just want to play with it and try it out for this project I'm working on, but that's impractical with default settings. I'm going to have to flee to mongodb or something not as good...
>
> I'm also a little nervous about this running on a server now -- I've read enough to understand that by default it's set up to eat lots of memory, and I'm fine with that... but it just lends itself to all the java bigotry that some of us accumulate over the years.
>
> Anyway, if someone can give me a pointer on how to set up to run on a laptop in a development setting, big thanks.
>
> Thanks!
> Gary
>