Configure cassandra to use different network interfaces for data streaming and client connection?

Question

I have a cassandra cluster deployed with 3 cassandra nodes with replication factor of 3. I have a lot of data being written to cassandra on daily basis (10-15GB). I have provisioned these cassandra on commodity hardware as suggested by "Big data community" and I am expecting the nodes to go down frequently which is handled using redundancy provided by cassandra.

My problem is, I have observed cassandra to slow down with writes when a new node is provisioned and the data is being streamed while bootstrapping. So, to overcome this hurdle, We have decided to have a separate network interface for inter-node communication and for client application to write data to cassandra. My question is how can this be configured, if at all this is possible ?

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I think you are chasing the wrong solution.

I am confused by the fact that you only have 3 nodes, yet your concern is around slow writes while bootstrapping. Why? Are you planning to grow your cluster regularly? What is your consistency level on write, as this has a big impact on performance? Obviously if you only have 2 or 3 nodes and you're trying to bootstrap, you will see a slowdown, because you're tying up a significant percentage of your cluster to do the streaming.

Note that "commodity hardware" doesn't mean cheap, low-performance hardware. It just means you don't need the super high-end database-class machines used for databases like Oracle. You should still use really good commodity hardware. You may also need more nodes, as setting RF equal to cluster size is not typically a great idea.

Having said that, you can set your listen_address to the inter-node interface and rpc_address to the client address if you feel that will help.