[andrewvc]

I'm a pretty big detractor of mongo, but I don't agree with this post. One of mongo's main design decisions is to defer writes, making this sort of thing possible. I think it's a crappy tradeoff but it is one of the things that makes mongodb mongodb. If you use it without knowing this you haven't researched it well.

[DanWaterworth]

When is this behaviour useful? (Benchmarks don't count)

[pooriaazimi]

I'm no expert in this area, but maybe if you want to use mongo for logging? Or things like that.

I kinda like TCP vs. UDP analogy. Sometimes you care more about speed than precision. A few dropped items in a log. Not a big deal. I'd rather have that, than to be forced to use a more expensive machine for the job.

That said, I absolutely think the default should be the TCP way.

[eli]

Well, any time you'd rather have speed over completeness. Maybe you're aggregating tweets from the Twitter API and if the occasional one goes missing, it's not a big deal, or perhaps you can grab it on the next update. Maybe you're generating a real-time stats dashboard for your site and if one pageview gets lost every million, it's not a big deal.

Look, I agree that in most cases you probably want to do everything you can to make your data 100% complete. But failed writes should be really rare, and there are plenty of times I'd trade the rare missing write for cheaper/faster database servers.

[DanWaterworth]

This wasn't the occasional write though, this was every write after 2GB. That should set off alarm bells somewhere.

[benatkin]

The way MongoDB is designed, this would be outside the scope of a driver. A storage library that's based on the ruby MongoDB driver could certainly do it, though. That's what the OP ideally should have been using. In fact MongoDB would be a good choice for his use case, if he would switch to a 64-bit VM and handle error conditions (heh).

[twerquie]

The problem with your code not caring if the odd record gets lost is that it probably also doesn't care if all records start getting lost.

[prodigal_erik]

If your failure modes are uncorrelated (i.e., spread across datacenter facilities with separate power supplies), you might be happy knowing a majority has accepted the write in memory, even though none of them have stored it yet (because that's slower if you're on spinning rust).