Raising the number of processes for Cassandra

Posted on July 9th, 2012

Redhat linux 6 and derivatives like CENTOS 6 lower the number of processes a user process can start to avoid accidental fork-bomls. Under high request rate this can cause the operating system to kill the cassandra process.

How to do it

Change the system limits from 1024 to 10240. Start a new shell for these changes to take effect.

vi /etc/security/limits.d/90-nproc.conf
*          soft    nproc     10240

How it works

An active cassandra server can create many threads and processes. Normally Cassandra daemonizes and runs as a standard user not root. This setting allows non root users to create more processes.

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