[rnewson]

Describing Bigcouch as a bit of hack while admitting you've not used it seems a little unfair. That said, it's very valuable to hear how other people see our product.

Without doing a full-on sales pitch (I am not a salesman and do not portray one on TV), I should say that Bigcouch adds a lot of desired features to CouchDB, notably scaling beyond a single machine and sharding (which supports very large databases). We run several clusters of Bigcouch nodes in production and have done for some time, it's a thrill for me personally to see a distributed database take a real pounding and keep on trucking.

I've been meaning to try Riak myself, so you've inspired me to finally pull down the code and give it a proper examination.

[biot]

My reading was that they found CouchDB to have problems and adding complexity on top of a problematic base wasn't an appealing proposition for them.

[rnewson]

My counterpoint is that Cloudant test and harden the CouchDB that we embed, it's not, for various reasons, a verbatim copy of CouchDB itself.

That said, vanilla CouchDB is quite stable. While there are always bugs, I don't recognize the system that the original poster is describing.

[cdavid]

What kind of data do you record (number of documents, average size of document) ? We have to use couchdb at my current job, and I have encoutered all those issues for even moderate size (replication failing more often than @ ~30-40 Gb). I wonder if that's an environment issue.