I am doing a batch insert via Mutator in Pycassa for composite rows and composite column names for counter Column Family. I see very slow write speeds. When i profiled with out network (mutator.send() ) on my MBP I am getting on average 3 seconds for 50K counter increment batch formations. I set the queue size to 0 to avoid network and cassandra write affecting the timing.Is this common ? or pycassa needs tweaking . Why should forming the batch packets takes that long ?