Before you start to claim the performance numbers of your Cassandra backend, based on numbers that you have read elsewhere, it is important to perform your own stress testing. It is very easy to do that in Cassandra, as it provides special tools for stress testing. It is a good idea to customize the parameters of the stress test, which represents a use case that is closer to what your application is going to do. This will save a lot of heated discussion later, due to discrepancies in the load testing and the actual throughput that the software is able to pull out of the setting.

Cassandra 2.1 ships with very sophisticated stress test tools that can be fine-tuned to simulate the expected load on the system and can help to measure Cassandra's performance under stress conditions. To create a load scenario, you need to set up a YAML file that specifies the four things: database schema, data distribution, write pattern, and read queries.