What’s New in Cassandra 1.0: Improved Memory and Disk Space Management

Cassandra 1.0 introduces several improvements to its storage engine, enhancing memory and disk management for better performance. Key updates include the addition of an off-heap row cache for reduced JVM heap requirements, self-tuning memtable sizes for optimal balance between write speed, compaction overhead, and memory use, a global commitlog_total_space_in_mb setting to manage data replay on startup, and explicit reference counting for efficient obsolete data file cleanup post-compaction. These enhancements address common pain points for Cassandra administration and improve overall performance.