A Cassandra component for improving performance of read-intensive operations. The row cache, in off-heap memory, holds rows most recently read from the local SSTables. Each local read operation stores its result set in the row cache and sends it to the coordinator node. The next read first checks the row cache. If the required data is there, Cassandra returns it immediately. This initial read can save further seeks in the Bloom filter, partition key cache, partition summary, partition index, and SSTables. Cassandra uses LRU (least-recently-used) eviction to ensure that the row cache is refreshed with the most frequently accessed rows. The size of the row cache can be configured in the cassandra.yaml file.