I have an issue where I'm posting single smallish (~500 bytes) documents to couchdb, yet the DB size is about 10x larger than expected (i.e., 10x larger than the aggregate size of the documents).
Documents are not deleted or modified after posting. It seems like what is happening is that every individual (unbatched write) always takes 4K due to the nature of the append-only algorithm writing 2 x 2K blocks for each modification as documented here: http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/btree.html OK, that's fine. What I don't understand is why the "compact" operation doesn't recover this space? I do recover the space if I replicate this DB somewhere else. The full copy takes about 10x less space. I would expect replicate to be able to do the same thing in place. Is there some option I'm missing? Note that I cannot use bulk writes since the documents are posted one by one by different clients.
