Cassandra Management and Maintenance - Real-time Analytics with Storm and Cassandra - page 167

4. After all the nodes are joined to the cluster, it's strictly recommended that you run
a nodetool cleanup command on all the nodes. This is recommended so
that they relinquish the control of the keys that were formerly owned by them but
now belong to the new nodes that have joined the cluster. Here is the command
and the execution output:
mydomain@my-cass3:/usr/local/cassandra/
apache-cassandra- 1.1.6/bin$ sudo -bE ./nodetool -h
10.3.12.178 cleanup my_keyspacemycf_index
mydomain@my-cass3:/usr/local/cassandra/
apache-cassandra- 1.1.6/bin$ du -h /var/lib/
cassandra/data/my_keyspace/mycf_index/
53G /var/lib/cassandra/data/my_keyspace/mycf_index/
mydomain@my-cass3:/usr/local/cassandra/
apache-cassandra- 1.1.6/bin$ jps
27389 Jps
26893 NodeCmd
17925 CassandraDaemon
5. Note that the NodeCmd process is actually the cleanup process for the Cassandra
daemon. The disk space reclaimed after the cleanup on the preceding node is
shown here:
Size before cleanup - 57G
Size after cleanup - 30G