SyncGateway Scaling

[conorm...@gmail.com]

Hi All,

I'm wondering if Sync Gateway will scale well for my application. This is my setup:

- CouchDB Server - 1k+ dbs
- Sync Gateway
- Couchbase Lite

I want to share each couch db with a mobile user via Sync Gateway. Each user will only be connected to one db, and each db can only be accessed by one user. This means I will have 1k+ Sync Gateway processes running to facilitate 1k users. This does not seem like a scalable solution.

Can anyone advise if this will be scalable? Otherwise, are there any alternatives? I'd like to keep my current DB architecture in place if possible.

Thanks

Conor

[Jens Alfke]

On Aug 13, 2014, at 3:06 AM, conorm...@gmail.com wrote:

I want to share each couch db with a mobile user via Sync Gateway. Each user will only be connected to one db, and each db can only be accessed by one user. This means I will have 1k+ Sync Gateway processes running to facilitate 1k users. This does not seem like a scalable solution.

It's not scaleable. Couchbase Server does not scale to large numbers of buckets, mostly because each bucket is pre-allocated a fairly large amount of RAM. It's not recommended to have more than a dozen or two buckets in a cluster.

Otherwise, are there any alternatives? I'd like to keep my current DB architecture in place if possible.

You should try to design your system to use a single database shared by all users. The Sync Gateway was expressly designed to support this, so it has a lot more access control than CouchDB does. 

Back in 2012 we tried to build a system (SyncPoint) based on CouchDB that used a one-db-per-user model, and realized it wasn't going to work well. It was kludgy to configure and not scaleable, especially if users shared documents.

—Jens