CouchDB broke my Box (not)
I tried to see how much beating CouchDB can take. So I installed it on a modest box (1.8GHz, 512 MB RAM, Debian) and started at 12:00h pouring data in it. At about 22:00h I asked for the computation of a simple view while still dumping data into it. At that Time it contained about 400.000 Documents of with about 10 % contained an Attatchment. DB size was on Disk was about 8 GB.
And an hour later (now) I can’t reach the box anymore.
I’m not sure this teaches us anything. On EC2 I’ve lost contact with boxes when using Hadoop due to load going so high sshd can’t respond (load of 25+). CouchDB of course will try to utilize your entire processor, and a view on 8GB of data may take some time to compute, but your box would normally be accessible.
Are you on Ec2? Is there something about your environment that would make your box drop offline under high load? In any case, once Couch is done building the view the load should drop to zero. For that many docs with that processor, a view could take on the order of hours to complete. Try accessing in the morning and see if it’s back.