On 10/6/10 1:13 PM, Aaron Morton wrote:
> To shutdown cleanly, say in a production system, use nodetool drain
> first. This will flush the memtables and put the node into a read only
> mode, AFAIK this also gives the other nodes a faster way of detecting
> the node is down via the drained node gossiping it's new status. Then kill.

FWIW, the gossiper related code for "drain" (trunk) looks like it just 
stops the gossip service, which is almost certainly the same thing that 
happens if you kill Cassandra.

./src/java/org/apache/cassandra/service/StorageService.java
"
     public synchronized void drain() throws IOException, 
InterruptedException, ExecutionException
...
   setMode("Starting drain process", true);
         Gossiper.instance.stop();
"

./src/java/org/apache/cassandra/gms/Gossiper.java
"
   public void stop()
     {
         scheduledGossipTask.cancel(false);
     }
"

=Rob