Hm, I assume you reached out to the mailing list and what not? I know a number of installations with numbers well above that. Were you using the batch insertion API?
No, I'm sure there are some great running instances out there - but I was put off by the difficulty of getting it reliably running without being an expert in its configuration. Additionally, the fact that I'd have to spend at least $12k/year to have only 3 nodes in a cluster, knowing we'd need a lot more than that as time went on sealed the deal.
We found that we could do everything we needed with secondary processing against our document store at runtime for so much less without adding another layer of complexity to the architecture.
Edit: forgot to mention - no we weren't use batch-insertion in all cases, IIRC, we had issues with duplication and had to do check-if-exists -> create-if-not as we were reading from raw data sources that were heavy with duplicates.
Many heavy duty production customers of Neo4j run with just a 3 node cluster, no need to scale out as with other NoSQL datastores. And actually they replaced larger clusters with a small Neo4j one.
I would love to learn about your Neo4j setup, and the issues in detail, I want to make it easier for people in your circumstances in the future to get quickly up and running with Neo4j in a reliable manner. If you're willing to help out, please drop me an email at michael at neotechnology dot com.
