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My problems with Couchbase: - Completely opaque administration. The company charges for support ($5k per production node per year!), so perhaps unsurprisingly
by bkeroack 12y ago
My problems with Couchbase:
- Completely opaque administration. The company charges for support ($5k per production node per year!), so perhaps unsurprisingly the log output is unreadable (similar to a binary stacktrace). Forget about diagnosing cluster issues on your own.
- Bizarre failover behavior. In every test scenario I've tried, if any single node goes down my application becomes unresponsive (even if it can see other nodes that are up). This could be a problem with the .NET driver, but it's hard to tell.
- Weird performance. Usually Couchbase is fast, but sometimes my application will go into what looks like a busywait loop and consume 100% CPU while trying to contact the Couchbase cluster. Again, possibly (probably?) a driver issue, but it makes me hate dealing with Couchbase.
- Ten bucket limit. Ostensibly for performance reasons, but cannot be over-ridden. Even if I'm running a non-production cluster where performance isn't critical.
At this point we're looking at switching to Redis. At least it's widely used and easier to administer.
- vosper 12y agoHi, thanks a lot for posting this! I have been thinking about using Couchbase Server for a mobile project because I like the mobile client component they have. I'm particularly concerned about the "opaque administration" issue - have you had to actually pay the company [1] for support because the log output is so bad, or did it just slow down your debugging process. [1] I have nothing against paying for support, but this is a personal project
- bkeroack 12y agoI don't have a problem with charging for support either, but Couchbase (for us) is just a memcache replacement, so that price is too high to justify. Without support the "debugging process" consists of blindly trying random things to fix the problem before giving up and moving on to something else.
- scalesolved 12y agoThe 'community' edition is free, can you run that in production? Agree on the crazy logs it generates.
- bkeroack 12y agoWe only run the community edition (everywhere). We could legally use the enterprise edition in QA, but it wouldn't make sense since production must be community.
- shirlema 12y ago(grain of salt: I work in the Cassandra Community team at DataStax) If you are considering a scalable solution, you can use DataStax Enterprise for free in production if you are a startup (under $20M raised and under $2M in annual revs). Check here: http://www.datastax.com/what-we-offer/products-services/datastax-enterprise/startups http://www.datastax.com/what-we-offer/products-services/data...
- vosper 12y agoThanks for pointing this out, I'm really looking at the document store aspect of Couchbase and the automatic syncing between mobile client and server, so I don't think Cassandra would help there.