> If you're building a social network the cost of some potential data loss is probably much less than the savings in hardare, admin costs, development costs, et

> If you're building a social network the cost of some potential data loss is probably much less than the savings in hardare, admin costs, development costs, etc. This also depends on what is being stored. I would be unhappy if Facebook lost any of my data, and my understanding is that they use safe storage mechanisms (ones where the commit goes all the way to disk before returning) for everything except transient views like the news feed and search. Also, I don't think it's clear that MongoDB has significantly improved either admin or development costs over its safe competition, so we probably only need to look at performance wins.