CouchDB .view file growing out of control?

Question

I recently encountered a situation where my CouchDB instance used all available disk space on a 20GB VM instance. Upon investigation I discovered that a directory in /usr/local/

Answer 1

CouchDB is very disk hungry, trading disk space for performance. Views will increase in size as items are added to them. You can recover disk space that is no longer needed with cleanup and compaction.

Every time you create update or delete a document then the view indexes will be updated with the relevant changes to the documents. The update to the view will happen when it is queried. So if you are making lots of document changes then you should expect your index to grow and will need to be managed with compaction and cleanup.

If your views are very large for a given set of documents then you may have poorly designed views. Alternatively your design may just require large views and you will need to manage that as you would any other resource.

It would be easier to tell what is happening if you could describe what document updates (inc create and delete) are happening and what your view functions are emitting, especially for the large view.