Cassandra dead but pid file exists

Question

I have novice to cassandra and tried my hands to install cassandra-2.1.2 on centos 7.0. After complete installation execute cqlsh command and created few keyspace(s) and column

Answer 1

rm /var/run/cassandra.pid

Run ps -ef | grep cassandra

Kill the pid of the cassandra process.

Start cassandra

Answer 2

Check if you have enough memory to start cassandra service with this command:

cat /proc/meminfo

I was running Hortonworks VM with Virtualbox, and I had a lot of Hadoop components started which needed a lot of memory, so for me the solution was to stop unnecessary Hadoop components and add some extra memory to the virtual machine.

Answer 3

From https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/cassandra-2.1/examples/client_only/README.txt#L43-L49 :

cassandra.yaml can be on the classpath as is done here, can be specified (by modifying the script) in a location within the classpath like this: java -Xmx1G -Dcassandra.config=/path/in/classpath/to/cassandra.yaml ... or can be retrieved from a location outside the classpath like this: ... -Dcassandra.config=file:///path/to/cassandra.yaml ... or ... -Dcassandra.config=http://awesomesauce.com/cassandra.yaml ...

So you probably had a misconfigured startup option.

Answer 4

fix this issue, Edit the cassandra-env.sh:

sudo vi /etc/cassandra/conf/cassandra-env.sh

increase heap size for cassandra .. this should resolve your issue

Answer 5

Remove the pid file. Try

rm /var/run/cassandra.pid