Cassandra - out of disk space

Question

Few servers hosting cassandra nodes (version 1.0.9) ran out of disk space (literally 0 bytes free). Cassandra nodes threw exceptions "no space on device" and effectively stopped. I noticed this happened on 4 out of 6 nodes in the ring.

I have a huge column family that I want to get rid of. It would free hundreds GB of the disk space and solve the problem. But I don't quite know what's the best way to do that.

If I physically delete the CF data files on disk (for each node) and then run 'drop column family' from column line I have a feeling the command won't complete correctly. What's the best course of action?

Answer 1

If you have a column family you want to remove completely, then you can:

In a rolling fashion:

1. stop node
2. rm *.db in the directory
3. start node

Then after removing all the files:

1. drop the column family