Sorting keys for batch reads to minimize seeks

[Artur Kronenberg]

Hi,

I am looking to somehow increase read performance on cassandra. We are 
still playing with configurations but I was thinking if there would be 
solutions in software that might help us speed up our read performance.

E.g. one idea, not sure how sane that is, was to sort read-batches by 
row-keys before submitting them to cassandra. The idea is that row-keys 
should be closer together on the physical disk and therefor this may 
minimize the amount of random seeks we have to do when querying say 1000 
entries from cassandra. Does that make any sense?

Is there anything else that we can do in software to improve 
performance? Like specific batch sizes for reads? We are using the 
astyanax library to access cassandra.

Thanks!