Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Scaling horizontally and vertically
We will see scaling in more detail in
Chapter 6
,
Managing Cluster - Scaling, Node Repair,
and Backup
, but let's discuss scaling in the context of performance tuning. As we know,
Cassandra is linearly and horizontally scalable. So, adding more nodes of Cassandra will
result in proportional gain in performance. This is called
horizontal scaling
.
The other thing that we have observed is that Cassandra reads are memory and disk speed
bound. So, having larger memory, allocating more memory to caches, and dedicated and
fast spinning hard disks (or SSDs) will boost the performance. Having high processing
power with multicore processors will help compression, decompression, and garbage col-
lection to run more smoothly. So, having a beefy server will help in overall performance
improvement. In today's cloud age, it is economical to use a lot of cheap and low-end ma-
chines than use a couple of expensive but high I/O, high CPU, and high memory machines.
