Which schemaless datastores provide good performance?

Question

I've recently written a web app that uses couchdb. I like couchdb and it suited the app - which has a lot of dynamic behaviour and simply pulls JSON directly from couchdb. Being able to upload images via a browser is nice and it's a snap to do tweaks to document data. The replication also has made deployment a breeze as the app is a couchapp, and all that's required to deploy is a replicate to the production server.

However for a new app I'm thinking off (think blog type thingy), I want good performance and it's one area I think couchdb is not strong in. The app will be predominantly read oriented (I'm estimating 90% reads to 10% writes).

Which datastores provide the best performance in a single server scenario? I'd be very interested to hear people's experiences in this...

Answer 1

I think MongoDB is beginning to look like the front runner performance wise for schemaless data stores.

We're currently in the processes of evaluating this for storing binary objects that can range from 10Kb to 50Mb and I've been very impressed with it's performance even on modest hardware.

Answer 2

If it is primarily read performance you are worried about why not just put a varnish proxy in front of couchdb? I use a couple of custom configurations in varnish to tell it not to actually query couchdb for cached objects despite couchdb specifying must-validate, then have a script with an active HTTP GET on _changes that uses the data from _changes in order to explicitly purge changed entries from varnish.

As a plus varnish lets you do URL rewriting, which I need. Most of the other solutions for it involve running something like apache or ngnix just to rewrite URLs for couchdb.