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

That your .view files grow, each time you access a view is because CouchDB updates views on access. CouchDB views need compaction like databases too. If you have frequent changes to your documents, resulting in changes in your view, you should run view compaction from time to time. See http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_view_API#View_Compaction

To reduce the size of your views, have a look at the data, you are emitting. When you emit(foo, doc) the entire document is copied to the view to it is very instantly available when you query the view. the function(doc) { emit(doc.title, doc); } will result in a view as big as the database itself. You could also emit(doc.title, nil); and use the include_docs option to let CouchDB fetch the document from the database when you access the view (which will result in a slightly performance penalty). See http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_view_API#Querying_Options