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by nikcub 5334 days ago
Links about Foursquare's problems with MongoDB. The site was down for a while when their 1.6 instance crashed:

* http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/

* http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/10/4square_mongodb_outage

* http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/th...

I like MongoDB, it is easy to setup, work with and to understand. I think it has an opportunity to become the mysql of nosql (in more ways than one)

Foursquare and 10gen (the makers of MongoDB) share USV as an investor.
1 comments
vannevar 5334 days ago
It should be noted that this was not really a problem with MongoDB. Foursquare used a poorly-chosen shard key that caused a disproportionate load on one of its shards, and on top of that did not have proper system monitoring in place to alert them that a server was running out of RAM. It should also be noted that no data was lost in the process of resolving the problem.
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latch 5334 days ago
And both companies were extremely transparent about it and the community generally appreciated the way it was handled:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mongodb-user/UoqU8of...

link
nikcub 5334 days ago
I thought both Foursquare and 10gen handled the situation then very well, especially considering how much traction the story got (it had all the elements - a popular service, a popular new database, etc.)

I was sort of suggesting that this anonymous post may have come from somebody at Foursquare, since what is described kinda matches what happen there. The 'politics' element could also match because of the common investor - but I see that both 10gen and 4sq have responded here saying that they do not know who wrote this - which I believe.

link