Re: One big CouchDB with a lot of documents vs. a lot of CouchDB databases with fewer documents

[Randall Leeds <ra...@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 05:59, Tong Li <li...@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>
> We recently work on a project and considering using CouchDB, but we would
> like to know if we should place all user documents in one big database or
> create one CouchDB database per user. This has to do with how CouchDB
> handles large number of databases. Assume CouchDB can handle a lot of
> documents within one database, but when large number of databases need to
> be open at same time, will CouchDB still be perfomant?

CouchDB can actually perform *better* with more databases than with
one database.
The reason is that updates have to be serialized for writing to disk.
More databases means more database files and higher concurrency of
write operations.

You may need to change some settings if you deal with many open
databases and lots of clients.
See this wiki page if/when you need to:
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Performance
Especially the sections on Resource Limits and Disk Performance.

In the future, this question is better suited for the user list
(user@couchdb.apache.org).

Regards,
Randall