Apache Cassandra 3.0 ships with three compaction strategies, which offer some control over the frequency and methods for managing the underlying files. These compaction strategy classes are SizeTieredCompactionStrategy (default), LeveledCompactionStrategy, and TimeWindowCompactionStrategy.
As previously mentioned, if not specified at table-creation time, a table will be built with with SizeTieredCompactionStrategy. While the size-tiered strategy does make for a good default, there are situations where performance can be improved by using a different strategy. One of Apache Cassandra's early main goals was the optimization of write throughput. Likewise, the size-tiered strategy is not necessarily the best option ...
