Cassandra Releases: Two Minor Upgrades

Cassandra has pushed out two new minor releases, first of them, 0.7.1, featuring a couple of performance improvements and new features, and the second, 0.7.2, fixing a critical bug in the 0.7.1 release.

Cassandra 0.7.1 Performance Improvements

• Disk writes and sequential scans avoid polluting page cache (requires JNA to be enabled)
• Cassandra performs writes efficiently across datacenters by sending a single copy of the mutation and having the recipient forward that to other replicas in its datacenter.
• Improved network buffering
• Reduced lock contention on memtable flush
• Optimized supercolumn deserialization
• Zero-copy reads from mmapped sstable files
• Explicitly set higher JVM new generation size
• Reduced i/o contention during saving of caches

Cassandra 0.7.1 New Features

• added flush_largest_memtables_at and reduce_cache_sizes_at options to cassandra.yaml as an escape valve for memory pressure
• added option to specify -Dcassandra.join_ring=false on startup to allow “warm spare” nodes or performing JMX maintenance before joining the ring

The complete list of changes can be found here:

Original title and link: Cassandra Releases: Two Minor Upgrades (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)