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Size Tiered Compaction Strategy

The basic idea of SizeTieredCompactionStrategy (STCS) is to merge sstables of approximately the same size. All sstables are put in different buckets depending on their size. An sstable is added to the bucket if size of the sstable is within bucket_low and bucket_high of the current average size of the sstables already in the bucket. This will create several buckets and the most interesting of those buckets will be compacted. The most interesting one is decided by figuring out which bucket’s sstables takes the most reads.

Major compaction

When running a major compaction with STCS you will end up with two sstables per data directory (one for repaired data and one for unrepaired data). There is also an option (-s) to do a major compaction that splits the output into several sstables. The sizes of the sstables are approximately 50%, 25%, 12.5%…​ of the total size.

STCS options

min_sstable_size (default: 50MB)

Sstables smaller than this are put in the same bucket.

bucket_low (default: 0.5)

How much smaller than the average size of a bucket a sstable should be before not being included in the bucket. That is, if bucket_low * avg_bucket_size < sstable_size (and the bucket_high condition holds, see below), then the sstable is added to the bucket.

bucket_high (default: 1.5)

How much bigger than the average size of a bucket a sstable should be before not being included in the bucket. That is, if sstable_size < bucket_high * avg_bucket_size (and the bucket_low condition holds, see above), then the sstable is added to the bucket.

Defragmentation

Defragmentation is done when many sstables are touched during a read. The result of the read is put in to the memtable so that the next read will not have to touch as many sstables. This can cause writes on a read-only-cluster.