CassandraDB nodes crash when 4 noes are present

I am trying to set up an Apache CassandraDB cluster via docker.

I've managed to create up to and including 3 nodes using docker run --network cassandra -e CASSANDRA_ENDPOINT_SNITCH=GossipingPropertyFileSnitch -e CASSANDRA_SEEDS=node0 --name "node0" -d cassandra.

Whenever I add a 4th node using the same command (just changing the container name), another random node in the cluster crashes and the node that was created also exits shortly after being on the UJ and DJ stages.

Here's what I've tried.

docker network create cassandra docker run --network cassandra -e CASSANDRA_ENDPOINT_SNITCH=GossipingPropertyFileSnitch -e CASSANDRA_SEEDS=node0 --name "node0" -d cassandra

I then waited until the node was up and nodetool was showing this:

Datacenter: dc1
===============
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address     Load       Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
UN  172.19.0.2  88.49 KiB  16      100.0%            15573541-fc19-4569-9a43-cb04e49e134f  rack1

After that, I added two additional nodes to the cluster.

docker run --network cassandra -e CASSANDRA_ENDPOINT_SNITCH=GossipingPropertyFileSnitch -e CASSANDRA_SEEDS=node0 --name "node1" -d cassandra docker run --network cassandra -e CASSANDRA_ENDPOINT_SNITCH=GossipingPropertyFileSnitch -e CASSANDRA_SEEDS=node0 --name "node2" -d cassandra

I waited until those two joined the cluster and nodetool showed this:

Datacenter: dc1
===============
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address     Load       Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
UN  172.19.0.2  74.11 KiB  16      64.7%             15573541-fc19-4569-9a43-cb04e49e134f  rack1
UN  172.19.0.4  98.4 KiB   16      76.0%             30afdc85-e863-452c-9031-59803e4b1f11  rack1
UN  172.19.0.3  74.04 KiB  16      59.3%             6d92cf62-65b4-4365-ab28-2d53872605e3  rack1

That seems good! After that, I wanted to add another node to test whether my replication factor was working properly. So, I added another node to the cluster using the same command:

docker run --network cassandra -e CASSANDRA_ENDPOINT_SNITCH=GossipingPropertyFileSnitch -e CASSANDRA_SEEDS=node0 --name "node3" -d cassandra

When I added this node, node1 crashed immediately. node3 (thats's the new one) was briefly on the UJ (UP-Joining) stage and then switched to DJ (DOWN-Joining) and was then removed from the nodelist.

Here are the results from nodetool status, in order:

Datacenter: dc1
===============
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address     Load       Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
UN  172.19.0.2  74.11 KiB  16      64.7%             15573541-fc19-4569-9a43-cb04e49e134f  rack1
UN  172.19.0.4  74.03 KiB  16      76.0%             30afdc85-e863-452c-9031-59803e4b1f11  rack1
DN  172.19.0.3  74.04 KiB  16      59.3%             6d92cf62-65b4-4365-ab28-2d53872605e3  rack1

Datacenter: dc1
===============
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address     Load       Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
UJ  172.19.0.5  20.75 KiB  16      ?                 2e4a25e4-3c81-4383-9c9f-6326e4043910  rack1
UN  172.19.0.2  74.11 KiB  16      64.7%             15573541-fc19-4569-9a43-cb04e49e134f  rack1
UN  172.19.0.4  74.03 KiB  16      76.0%             30afdc85-e863-452c-9031-59803e4b1f11  rack1
DN  172.19.0.3  74.04 KiB  16      59.3%             6d92cf62-65b4-4365-ab28-2d53872605e3  rack1

Datacenter: dc1
===============
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address     Load       Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
DJ  172.19.0.5  20.75 KiB  16      ?                 2e4a25e4-3c81-4383-9c9f-6326e4043910  rack1
UN  172.19.0.2  74.11 KiB  16      64.7%             15573541-fc19-4569-9a43-cb04e49e134f  rack1
UN  172.19.0.4  74.03 KiB  16      76.0%             30afdc85-e863-452c-9031-59803e4b1f11  rack1
DN  172.19.0.3  74.04 KiB  16      59.3%             6d92cf62-65b4-4365-ab28-2d53872605e3  rack1

Datacenter: dc1
===============
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address     Load       Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
UN  172.19.0.2  74.11 KiB  16      64.7%             15573541-fc19-4569-9a43-cb04e49e134f  rack1
UN  172.19.0.4  74.03 KiB  16      76.0%             30afdc85-e863-452c-9031-59803e4b1f11  rack1
DN  172.19.0.3  74.04 KiB  16      59.3%             6d92cf62-65b4-4365-ab28-2d53872605e3  rack1

Here are the logs for node1: As you can see, the first item in the log was the confirmation that node2 had connected to the cluster.

https://gist.github.com/janic0/7e464e5c819c37e6ed38819fb3c19eff

Here are the logs for node3 (again, that's the new node)

https://gist.github.com/janic0/0968b7136c3beb3ef76a2379f3cd9be5

Solution

I've investigated it and found that Docker kills these containers with exit code 137 - or "out of memory".

Yep, I thought something like that was happening.

Each of the nodes used up about 4GB of RAM and the forth node was just enough to force Docker to kill some of the containers. If you do want to host that many nodes on one machine for some reason, you can increase the memory limit:

So I've done something like this before. If you're just going to be doing some local testing and you want a multi-node cluster, I've used Minikube for that before. In fact, I put together a repo which has some resources for doing that: https://github.com/aploetz/cassandra_minikube

But another approach which might be a "quick fix" for you, would be to explicitly adjust the Java heap sizing to something much smaller for each of your nodes. In my Minikube example above, I'd set:

-Xms512M
-Xmx512M
-Xmn256M

This should create a 1/2 GB heap, which is plenty for local dev or some simple testing. You can set these values in your cassandra-env.sh or jvm-server.options file (depending on your Cassandra version).