Author of the article here. The count caching solved the problem for most practical production purposes (CRITICAL ALLITERATION), but it's still uglier than I'd

Author of the article here. The count caching solved the problem for most practical production purposes (CRITICAL ALLITERATION), but it's still uglier than I'd like. However, if the use case is pagination, then "faking it" once you reach a certain size works well, and is unlikely to be noticed by the user. If your counts are on relatively static pieces of your dataset, then keeping counts manually somewhere (via $inc) will get you that performance back, but obviously at the cost of having to maintain it all manually. Incremental map/reduce isn't a bad idea, but again, depends on the complexity of what's being counted. All in all, it's something of a sore spot in an otherwise very enjoyable development experience.