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

Use sequential or monotonic id's for documents instead of random

Yes, couchdb is very disk hungry, and it needs regular compactions. But there is another thing that can help reducing this disk usage, specially sometimes when it's unnecessary.

Couchdb uses B+ trees for storing data/documents which is very good data structure for performance of data retrieval. However use of B-tree trades in performance for disk space usage. With completely random Id, B+-tree fans out quickly. As the minimum fill rate is 1/2 for every internal node, the nodes are mostly filled up to the 1/2 (as the data spreads evenly due to its randomness) generating more internal nodes. Also new insertions can cause a rewrite of full tree. That's what randomness can cause ;)

Instead, use of sequential or monotonic ids can avoid all.