Earlier this month, I gave a presentation at GoGaRuCo about using CouchDB, and how many people do it in inappropriate or wasteful ways.

The centerpiece of my talk was a step-by-step example of best-practices for CouchDB interaction, leading to an improvement of 99% in the median time it takes to do a simple insert to CouchDB (or Cloudant). Admittedly, I start from a worst-case scenario, but the scary part is that it is not a totally unrealistic one; in fact, I’ve seen it replicated many times over.

After factoring my advice in, we have a performance improvement of 96% (if you stick to conversing with CouchDB through JSON, which is recommended for now), or 99% with my experimental patches to support MessagePack in CouchDB & CouchRest.

What’s more, none of the advice I give leads to a relaxation in consistency or durability. It’s plain optimization, no strings attached, just there for the taking. Many of the points I touch on are also valid no matter what language or library you are using (or are easily translatable to other ecosystems), so I would strongly encourage anybody using CouchDB and interested in performance optimization to look at the video.

Head on over over to Confreaks to see the video (the meat of the talk starts at the 5:10 mark).