[ghop02]

Syncing smaller databases between devices seems to be the best use case of CouchDB.

However, Couch is extremely difficult to manage at scale, especially when managing indexes on top of documents. The index generation was extremely slow and wasn't able to take advantage of beefier hardware at all. Deploying updates to indexes had to be done extremely carefully as it will rebuild the entire index and lock reads from that index in the meantime.

Iterating through GB of documents takes a wildly long amount of time, especially if other operations such as indexing updates are happening.

Furthermore it had scary failure modes. There were many times that a couch instance would die with documents cached in memory but not yet written to disk, even though couch had returned a successful document write. We found that documents we thought existed were lost forever during this blip.