Pre-Flight Check
- These instructions are intended for Cassandra 2 on a single CentOS 6 server.
- I’ll be working from a Liquid Web Core Managed CentOS 6.4 server, and I’ll be logged in as root.
A Bit of Cassandra Optimization
For a refresher on editing files with vim see: New User Tutorial: Overview of the Vim Text Editor
Set nproc limits:
vim /etc/security/limits.d/90-nproc.conf
Add the following line to the bottom of the file, using i to insert:
* - nproc 32768
Your file should now look very similar to this:

vim /etc/sysctl.conf
Add the following line to the bottom of the file, using i to insert:
# Recommended Production Setting for Cassandra
vm.max_map_count = 131072
Your file should now look very similar to this:

sysctl -p
Now we’re going to turn-off swap. This can be done with the following command:
swapoff --all
Then, we’ll entirely disable swap by removing all swap entries from /etc/fstab:
vim /etc/fstab
If you’re using a Liquid Web CentOS 6 Core Managed image then you’ll remove this line using dd :
LABEL=SWAP-vda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
Your file should now look very similar to this before removing the above line:
