K
Kristina Chodorow
snailinaturtleneck.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2010
Kristina Chodorow, a MongoDB developer, writes about MongoDB internals, tools, and performance, plus some startup and career topics.
What HN saysHN commenters cite her MongoDB performance post as a point in a debate over Mongo's reliability, noting she is a core driver developer at 10gen.
17HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
15stories submitted
185story points
15 years agolast shared
2010people per year2026
Most-shared posts
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- 11Setting Up Your Interview Toolbox1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 12About1 people · first shared 2010
- 13Couchdb vs mongodb benchmark1 people · first shared 2010
What HN people wrote when they linked it
ericflo · 2011-11-06
But it does 8,000,000 operations per second! http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/2010/05/05/with-a-name-like-mon…
(Sorry, possibly excessive snark. That said, I think that blog post is a good example of one of this pastebin author's points: at least historically, benchmark numbers have been a big focus for Mongo developers.)
trustfundbaby · 2010-08-20
My apologies if I wasn't clear enough.
The comment (which is what I linked directly to) came from the writer of the actual blog, who is one of the main developers for the Mongo DB PHP driver.
http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/about/
So I would take it with far more than a pinch of salt.
kristina · 2010-07-08
I've tried to post this as a comment on the blog, but it's not showing up (moderated?):
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Full disclosure: I work for 10gen.
You strategically posted this when my air conditioning was broken, so here are a few thoughts before I go find somewhere cooler. Since CouchDB is "not a competitor" to MongoDB, it's nice of you to put all this time into a public service.
> MongoDB, <b>by default</b>, doesn’t actually have a response for writes.
Whoopsy, got your emphasis wrong there. We did this to make MongoDB look good in stupid benchmarks (http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/2009/06/29/couchdb-vs-mongodb-b…
Seriously, though, this "unchecked" type of write is just supposed to be for stuff like analytics or sensor data, when you're getting a zillion a second and don't really care some get lost if the server crashes. <b>You can do an insert that not only waits for a database response, but waits for N slaves (user configurable) to have replicated that insert.</b> Note that this is very similar to Cassandra's "write to multiple nodes" promise. You can also fsync after every write.
> MongoDB writes to a mem-mapped file and lets the kernel fsync it whenever
> the kernel feels like it.
fsyncs are configurable. You can fsync once a second, never, or after every single insert, remove, and update if you wish.
> When you look at MongoDB more critically I don’t see how you could actually
> justify using it for anything resembling the traditional role of a…