[willbmoss]

I agree with you in theory, in practice, my experience has been a bit different. Specifically,

1. Since Mongo has a database (or maybe collection now) level lock, doing rebalancing under a heavy write load is impossible.

3. Mongos creates one thread per connection. This means that if you've got to be very careful about the number of clients you start up at any given time (or in total).

[taligent]

1. Why would you be rebalancing under heavy write load. Wouldn't it be scheduled for quieter periods ?

2. I was under the impression that almost all Mongo drivers had connection pools.

[bsg75]

> Why would you be rebalancing under heavy write load. Wouldn't it be scheduled for quieter periods ?

I think the example case is when a node fails during a load period - unplanned vs planned.

Some of the public MongoDB stories come from shops that were forced to rebalance during peak loads because they failed to plan to do so in a maintenance window.

Of course waiting to scale out until _after_ it becomes a need will result in pain (of various degrees) no matter what the data storage platform.