Cassandra vnodes: can I lower the number on slower nodes and expect rebalancing to occur automatically?

Question

I am running a small Cassandra 2.2.1 test cluster with 3 computers in it. Two of them are i7s and one is a somewhat slower i5, but I didn\'t bother when first setting things

Answer 1

I don't have sufficient reputation to comment, but to answer Thomas Browne's question: Don't do that! If you drop the tables and keyspaces, you'll lose all the data on all the nodes. What you'll want to do is stop cassandra, go to your data directory on the node you're modifying, and rm -rf * the data in that directory. Eg: rm -rf /var/lib/cassandra/*