CouchDB was made for next generation filesystems such as ZFS and BTRFS. First off, unlike PostgreSQL or MySQL, CouchDB can be snapshot while in production without any flushing or locking trickery since it uses an append only B-Tree storage approach. That alone makes it a compelling database choice on ZFS/BTRFS.

Second, CouchDB works hand-in-hand with ZFS’s block level compression. ZFS can compress blocks of data as they are being written out to the disk. However, it only does it for new blocks and not retroactively. Now, the awesome part, CouchDB on compaction writes out a brand new database file which can utilize the new gzip compression settings on ZFS. This means you can try out different gzip compression settings just by compacting your CouchDB.

Some tips on running CouchDB on ZFS:

1. Use automated snapshots to prevent $admin error, it is painless with ZFS and CouchDB loves being snapshot 😉

You can give my little ruby script a try for daily snapshots; I use it both on Mac OSX and Solaris for automated ZFS snapshot goodness.


zfs snapshot rpool/couchdb@mysnapshot-tuesday

2. Try out various gzip compression schemes on your CouchDB workload, re-compact the database to use the new gzip compression settings. I personally use the gzip-4 compression for our workload which strikes the perfect balance between space and cpu utilization.


zfs set compression=gzip-4 rpool/couchdb

3. Set the ZFS dataset to 4k block record size and turn off atime. Yes the B-Tree append only approach is elastic on writes but you can have near perfect tiny writes with a small 4k block record size.


zfs set recordsize=4k rpool/couchdb
zfs set atime=off rpool/couchdb