CouchDB: checkpointing on view building

I’m posting about this tidbit because Google seemed to know nothing about it.

Anyway, during the view building process, we may see the following in the couchdb.log (level = info, at least, in local.ini):

[...] [info] [...] checkpointing view update at seq 78163851 for citations _design/erlang
[...] [debug] [...] New task status for citations _design/erlang: Processed 17844590 of 107444308 changes (16%)
[...] [debug] [...] New task status for citations _design/erlang: Processed 17848060 of 107444308 changes (16%)
[...] [debug] [...] New task status for citations _design/erlang: Processed 17850878 of 107444308 changes (16%)
[...] [info] [...] checkpointing view update at seq 78170348 for citations _design/erlang
[...] [debug] [...] New task status for citations _design/erlang: Processed 17851087 of 107444308 changes (16%)

The above tells us, that CouchDB saved the current process during indexing and allows us to resume in case we decide to restart the CouchDB and interrupt the indexing process. I’ve tried it myself a couple times with CouchDB 0.10.0 — I also had not noticed this feature prior to it.

And why is this useful in particular? The biggest use for this is upgrading computing power (e.g. on AWS EC2) when we realize we need MOAR and then we are still able to resume when we boot into more resources.

Sidenote: Checkpointing will not help if indexing is stopped and the view is adjusted/changed. Or when the indexing stopped due to an error, such as a crash.

That’s all, kids.