CouchDB indexing blocking atlas loading

[ahayes]

Could we experiment with the stale=update_after option when querying CouchDB to see if we can avoid waiting for it to reindex? This is affecting active atlases where data is being imported and changed in regular use.

[ahayes]

I think it is worth exploring the stale option to handle situations where there is a lot of data being loaded or changed in an active atlas.

One other thing that causes this issue is when a design document change results in a rebuild of all the views associated with it. Because almost all our views that matter to an atlas are stored on the atlas document, along with the contents of htdocs, it can happen that what seems like an innocuous change in htdocs can cause the atlas to stall until all the views are re-indexed.

This later situation could potentially be resolved by creating separate design documents for views, and maybe splitting out expensive views like full text and geometry bounding box indexing into their own design docs. I believe that would then prevent them from being rebuilt unless the view code itself changed.