Large Partitions Hunting¶

What Should Make You Want To Start Looking For A Large Partition?¶

Any of the following:

• Latencies on a single shard become very long (look at the “Scylla Overview Metrics” dashboard of ScyllaDB Monitoring Stack).

• Oversized allocation warning messages in the log:

  seastar_memory - oversized allocation: 2842624 bytes, please report
  

• A warning of “Writing large (partition|row|cell)” is issued when writing to a table (usually happens during a compaction):

  WARN  2022-09-22 17:33:11,075 [shard 1]large_data - Writing large partition Some_KS/Some_table: [COL] (SIZE bytes) to SSTABLE_NAME
  

  In this case, refer to Troubleshooting Large Partition Tables for more information.

What To Do When You Suspect You May Have A Large Partition?¶

For each table you suspect run:

nodetool flush <keyspace name> <table name>
nodetool cfstats <keyspace name>.<table name> | grep "Compacted partition maximum bytes"

For example:

nodetool cfstats demodb.tmcr | grep "Compacted partition maximum bytes"

                Compacted partition maximum bytes: 1188716932

Using system tables to detect large partitions, rows, or cells¶

Starting from scylla 2.3, large partitions are listed in the system.large_partitions table. See Scylla Large Partitions Table for more information.

Starting from scylla 3.1, large rows and large cells are listed similarly in the system.large_rows and system.large_cells tables, respectively. See Scylla Large Rows and Cells Tables for more information.

When Compaction Creates an Error¶

When compaction or writing to a table results in a “Writing a partition with too many rows” warning:

This warning indicates that there is a huge multi-row partition (based on the number of rows) and it is orthogonal to the size-based warnings. The warning is controlled by compaction_rows_count_warning_threshold, which is set in the scylla.yaml. See Troubleshooting Large Partition Tables for more information.