title: Controlling Major Compaction in Cassandra
body: <p>I am relatively new to Cassandra, so I apologize in advance if I am missing something obvious.
  So, I am using cassandra 1.0.12 in a one node cluster and doing heavy writes and deletes (about 1000/sec). Writes are more frequent then deletes as a result my disk space goes on increasing. If I understand correctly the compaction would help me achieve that (Major and Minor). So I changed setGc_grace_seconds to 0 and setMin_compaction_threshold to 2. Even after setting these values I am seeing SSTable count 4 for that Column Family, shouldn't it kick compaction when the SSTable count is 2 ? Also, when does major compaction kick in and how can I control it (I want to run it more often).</p>