2026-06-08 –, Kesselhaus
All software benchmarks and claims of performance are carefully crafted lies and this talk is no different. Instead of giving you a quick “do steps one, two, three for a magic speedup”, we aim to explain how we arrived at the changes we made and how we rigorously tested those changes to make sure we understand their impact.
This talk will take the attendee on a performance tuning journey. From benchmarking fundamentals as the foundation, we are going through six distinct steps of always finding the next bottleneck in a large distributed cluster setup of CouchDB. We will cover, in-depth, ways to measure and improve:
- Disk I/O
- HTTP request and response times
- TCP Accept handling
- CPU Utilisation and Process Scheduling in an Erlang system
- Erlang cluster communication networking
In the end, our client successfully launched their latest version of a AAA sports game with capacity to spare.
Jan Lehnardt is a developer and businessperson from Berlin. He’s the PMC Chair for Apache CouchDB and PouchDB as well as a CEO at Neighbourhoodie Software. He’s been building scalable database solutions with CouchDB since 2007.