connection timeouts and multitasking

["Christopher D. Malon" <ma...@groupring.net>]

Hi,

I'm running CouchDB 1.5.0 on a single-processor EC2 ubuntu (m3.medium)
instance.  A preforking web application that accesses the database runs
on the same server.

I am testing the system with a single user.  In most cases, the web application's process
waits for the CouchDB response before proceeding with any other activity.

Intermittently, some simple GET requests (record accesses, not view queries)
to CouchDB from the web app are timing out.  I'm nowhere near max_connections
or max_dbs_open yet.

Standard advice might be to put the DB and web app on separate servers,
but since this problem occurs already with a single user, I'm not confident
that would fix anything.  The only possibly nonstandard thing I'm doing is
aggressively issuing a view query with "stale=update_after" after every
record update to the database, and that reindexing might still be running when I
try to send another read request.

Have others experienced these kinds of timeouts, and should I respond by
increasing the number of CPU cores or offloading the DB from the server?

Thanks,
Christopher