Hi Stefan,

There are 2 commands that fit this description and both have their use. These commands are:

Nodetool flush: flush everything in memory on disk, but cassandra keeps listening for new updates/deletes. Useful right before taking a backup where service should not be interupted.

Nodetool drain: Flushes all the in-memory stuff and closes the listening port so no new changes can be serviced by this node. Useful when you have to shutdown the node for maintenance as the startup will not need to replay all the commitlogs.