On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 09:48:59AM -0500, Nathan Vander Wilt wrote: > Thanks for these suggestions, Joan. Unfortunately it seems the server is > under quite the opposite situation though: this is an m1.medium instance
Smoking gun. AWS instances are notorious for bad disk throughput. Ultimately, CouchDB is heavily driven by disk performance. If your instance is EBS-backed, You're going to observe a ton of latency and worse; it's a bit of an open secret that Amazon's internal networking is oversubscribed, especially in us-east. You can prove it to yourself by swapping out this instance temporarily with a physical machine with approximately the same configuration. m1.medium is 1 CPU, 4GB of RAM, so your average laptop - try booting Linux from a thumb drive and running off of a dedicated HDD, even over USB. You'll find it performs significantly faster. If this works well, you can try running AWS instances from ephemeral storage instead of EBS for a bit of a boost, but you'll still be running into other unknowns on the backend. You may want to consider VMs from other companies in nearby data centers if you have your infrastructure in us-east-1, such as SoftLayer's Washington DC data center, NAC in NJ or Rackspace in Chicago. Good luck, Joan -- Joan Touzet | [email protected] | wohali everywhere else
