Recommended Production Settings for Cassandra on CentOS 6

If you’ve already followed the tutorial on How To Install Cassandra on CentOS 6, then you’re ready for another step!

• These instructions are intended for Cassandra 2 on a single CentOS 6 server.
• I’ll be working from a Liquid Web Core Managed CentOS 6.4 server, and I’ll be logged in as root.

For a refresher on editing files with vim see: New User Tutorial: Overview of the Vim Text Editor

Set nproc limits:

vim /etc/security/limits.d/90-nproc.conf

Add the following line to the bottom of the file, using i to insert:

* - nproc 32768

Your file should now look very similar to this:

You can either match the spacing of the 90-nproc.conf , or simply enter the above line exactly as it appears. Then exit and save the file with the command :wq .

Next, we’ll edit the sysctl.conf :

vim /etc/sysctl.conf

Add the following line to the bottom of the file, using i to insert:

# Recommended Production Setting for Cassandra
vm.max_map_count = 131072

Your file should now look very similar to this:

Then exit and save the file with the command :wq .

So the changes take effect, issue the following command or reboot the server:

sysctl -p

Now we’re going to turn-off swap. This can be done with the following command:

swapoff --all

Then, we’ll entirely disable swap by removing all swap entries from /etc/fstab:

vim /etc/fstab

If you’re using a Liquid Web CentOS 6 Core Managed image then you’ll remove this line using dd :

LABEL=SWAP-vda2 swap swap defaults 0 0

Your file should now look very similar to this before removing the above line:

Exit and save the file with the command :wq . Done!