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> Avoid compactions where possible, including the downsampling path, to increase the utilization of host resources for more concurrent writes and provide steady write/read latency.

What does that mean? What kind of compaction?

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So if you look at a lot of LSM databases they basically optimize for write throughput by design but also ultimately spend a lot of time on compaction of sstable like file volumes. So we avoid a lot of compaction of volumes together by making volumes time window based rather than other limits like heap size, etc. This means that your resources ultimately do less work and should cost less. The flip side is that you do need to make sure you have enough heap for your mutable data (which is fine in the steady write case, but for back fills means you should be more careful and use libraries to coordinate the backfills)

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