Thank you very much! I now understand things much better.

However, my configuration is as follows:

  <CommitLogSync>periodic</CommitLogSync>
  <CommitLogSyncPeriodInMS>10000</CommitLogSyncPeriodInMS>

So I should see my commit log change after 10,000 milliseconds = 10 seconds?
It seems to take much longer to show up.

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Andrew Rollins <andrew@localytics.com>wrote:

> By default Cassandra syncs the commit log to disk periodically, so if you
> are looking at file sizes, you won't see the most up to date numbers. This
> is just like how if you tail a file that isn't flushing frequently, you
> might wait a little while before you see the updates.
>
> In periodic mode, Cassandra acknowledges the write to the client
> immediately (even before it is synced). You can run Cassandra in batch mode
> instead, which basically means it writes in batches *and* it won't
> acknowledge the writes to the client until it has actually synced. I'm still
> somewhat new to this, but that's my understanding.
>
> Have a look at CommitLogSync in your storage-conf.xml for more info about
> setting up syncing periods.
>
> As an aside, I'm not sure why the "ack immediately" or "ack after sync"
> setting is piggybacked on the periodic vs batch setting. At first glance it
> seems like concepts should be independent of one another.
>
> - Andrew
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 3:34 AM, David Boxenhorn <david@lookin2.com> wrote:
>
>> As I understand it, when you write to Cassandra, you are assured that, if
>> successful, the new data has been written to a log file - so that if there
>> is a crash your data is safe. Is this correct?
>>
>> If the above is correct, there is something going on that I don't
>> understand. Are the log files to which the data is first written the ones
>> that look like /var/lib/cassandra/commitlog/CommitLog-1277998453387.log ?
>> The reason I ask is that when I write a lot of data, nothing seems to change
>> in the commitlog directory for a long time, then at some point the log files
>> in this directory get updated. It looks to me like there's memory caching
>> involved, and the new data is not being immediately written to disk. What is
>> going on?
>>
>
>