title: what is the meaning of owns% in cassandra and how to change it?
body: <p>I've configured the cannsadra cluster (cassandra-1.1) of 4 instances.
  I have 2 pc's and i'm running 2 instances at each pc.
  The pc's are identical, and have 20G ram.
  But, when I'm running nodetool it show me different Owns %. The question is WHY?</p>
  
  <pre><code>./bin/nodetool  -p 8001 ring
  
  Note: Ownership information does not include topology, please specify a keyspace. 
  Address         DC          Rack        Status State   Load            Owns                     Token                                                                                                                                   51042355038140769519506191114765231718      
  172.16.40.32    datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  11.12 KB        70.00%              0                                           
  127.0.0.2       datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  11.31 KB        10.00%              17014118346046923173168730371588410572      
  172.16.40.202   datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  6.7 KB          10.00%              34028236692093846346337460743176821145      
  127.0.0.3       datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  11.18 KB        10.00%              51042355038140769519506191114765231718 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>my free -m looks on both machines:</p>
  
  <pre><code>        total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:         20119       9621      10497          0        281       7925
  -/+ buffers/cache:       1414      18704
  Swap:         2894          2       2892
  </code></pre>