Cassandra JVM heap sizes on EC2

[David Laube <da...@stormpath.com>]

Hi All,

We are evaluating our JVM heap size configuration on Cassandra 1.2.8 and would like to get some feedback from the community as to what the proper JVM heap size should be for cassandra nodes deployed on to Amazon EC2. We are running m2.4xlarge EC2 instances (64GB RAM, 8 core, 2 x 840GB disks) --so we will have plenty of RAM. I've already consulted the docs at http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cassandra/1.2/mobile/cassandra/operations/ops_tune_jvm_c.html but would love to hear what is working or not working for you in the wild. Since Datastax cautions against using more than 8GB, I'm wondering if it is even advantageous to use even slightly more.

Thanks,
-David Laube

Re: Cassandra JVM heap sizes on EC2

[Brian Tarbox <ta...@cabotresearch.com>]

The advice I heard at the New York C* conference...which we follow is to
use the m2.2xlarge and give it about 8 GB.  The m2.4xlarge seems overkill
(or at least over price).

Brian


On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 6:12 PM, David Laube <da...@stormpath.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> We are evaluating our JVM heap size configuration on Cassandra 1.2.8 and
> would like to get some feedback from the community as to what the proper
> JVM heap size should be for cassandra nodes deployed on to Amazon EC2. We
> are running m2.4xlarge EC2 instances (64GB RAM, 8 core, 2 x 840GB disks)
> --so we will have plenty of RAM. I've already consulted the docs at
> http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cassandra/1.2/mobile/cassandra/operations/ops_tune_jvm_c.html but
> would love to hear what is working or not working for you in the wild.
> Since Datastax cautions against using more than 8GB, I'm wondering if it is
> even advantageous to use even slightly more.
>
> Thanks,
> -David Laube
>
>

Re: Cassandra JVM heap sizes on EC2

[Janne Jalkanen <Ja...@ecyrd.com>]

We've been trying to keep the heap as small as possible; the disk access penalty on EC2 is big enough - even on instance store - that you want to give as much memory to disk caches as you can.  Of course, then you will need to keep extra vigilant on your garbage collection and tune various things like bloom filters, cache sizes (if using on-heap cache) and sstable size for LCS accordingly.

YMMV of course; we're running on m1.xlarge, so we have less RAM to play with than you. It all depends on your data size, the size of the hot portion, etc.  Currently we use 3.5GB for Cassandra 1.2.8, which seems like a good tradeoff for our usage patterns.  I tend to bump the heap up and down in .5 GB intervals just to see what happens; let it run for a few hours or a day and then check Munin graphs to see what the effect was compared to other nodes.

/Janne

On Aug 24, 2013, at 01:12 , David Laube <da...@stormpath.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> We are evaluating our JVM heap size configuration on Cassandra 1.2.8 and would like to get some feedback from the community as to what the proper JVM heap size should be for cassandra nodes deployed on to Amazon EC2. We are running m2.4xlarge EC2 instances (64GB RAM, 8 core, 2 x 840GB disks) --so we will have plenty of RAM. I've already consulted the docs at http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cassandra/1.2/mobile/cassandra/operations/ops_tune_jvm_c.html but would love to hear what is working or not working for you in the wild. Since Datastax cautions against using more than 8GB, I'm wondering if it is even advantageous to use even slightly more.
> 
> Thanks,
> -David Laube
>