I have two sites one using Couchdb and the other chicagoboss+mongodb both scale well over for 500K users so far. The best part of it is that they both run on very cheap. chicagoboss on a bunch of m1.small spot instances and mongodb on a reserved m1.large While couchdb a group of spot instances and reserved m1.smalls. Erlang based web apps really scale well. http://www.ostinelli.net/a-comparison-between-misultin-mochiweb-cowboy-nodejs-and-tornadoweb/

thanks SWB - this is good advice

What works for a Hackintosh will usually work well for Linux. Check http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/search/label/CustoMac. These builds have been well tested and I've used them for Ubuntu successfully.

Two great tutorials for two great languages: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!: http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters or Learn You some Erlang: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ These languages are different from the herd yet particle (Erlang more so). Erlang is used in hundreds of products and systems and it's paradigm matches our real world.

You are right in that context it's not a bad course - still the level is pretty puerile. I guess it's good to keep the young stupid....

I enrolled but it could never engage me. It was poor in depth and structure. I tried on it my children (11 & 16) and they found it boring and a bit too slow. I guess it could pass for 6th grade content but never for a university course. I guess I though I would be getting something similar to Downey's Think Stats or the Heads Up Series - which I don't like but is generally well thought out and well pitched. I can't help feeling that this is like everything else out of the google stables - well hyped but half baked - Yes if this is the way forward I can only feel content that my education was a cut above the rest and there will be plenty of highly paid work available for me right until my death.

That branch is well know for peddling. Their employees make next to nothing and so like to augment their income... ...just like in casino's and certain street corners photography is not welcome.

Clues to the source of some of Sauce Labs' problems can be gleamed from their list of Maintenance headaches:

View indexes are only updated when queried — insertion does not update the index. That means you have to write a script to periodically run all your views, unless you want them to be surprisingly slow when they haven’t been queried in a while. In practice we always preferred view availability to any performance boost obtained by not updating indexes on insertion, but writing reliable scripts to keep view indexes up to date was tricky.

Oh please doing an HTTP GET periodically is tricky ??? No it's not. With couchdb if your database is very dynamic you should either index periodically and very frequently. This creates a quantified and controlled performance demand on the server. Ideally read servers should never be the write server and replication should be filtered. Using Couchdb naively will lead to failure. Don't use javascript views, python views are 3-4 x faster, erlang views are 7-10 faster. Used in the right way and following the many tips that you can get from the Couchdb community will make Couchdb not just a great database but a great application platform.

And yes 1.2 is a great improvement.

Currently I'm using coucdb, mongodb, and MySQL all in one high profile project handling terabytes of data and millions of hits. Each has it's use. When it comes to reliability and performance all three DBs are NOT my problem.