I'm not sure how hosting a video for Gawker builds a lot of credibility for having field tested a database; perhaps there are more details he can provide about how that is a particularly interesting trial for a database. Among other things, that seems like "lots and lots of reads, very few writes" and a "very consistent access pattern regardless" kind of situation.
Ha! Fair point. I thought it was an interesting trial in that all updates to our user data wound up being published into MongoDB. All the other tools we'd tried for this purpose, CouchDB, MySQL with both MyISAM and InnoDB and even "thousands of .js files in a hashed directory structure" didn't perform as well. It allowed us to shift the load from our MySQL database to "something else" as during our spikes we were getting killed. It was a read-heavy workload in that case.
The thing that struck me about the original post was how it seemed some of the complaints were just normal things that people learn when dealing with clusters under load. "Adding a shard under heavy load is a nightmare." Well, I mean, duh. If you add a shard and the cluster has to rebalance, you're adding load. It's like how you're more likely to get a disk failure during a RAID rebuild. The correct time to add a shard is during the off hours.
