Are Amazon's micro instances (Linux, 64bit) good for MongoDB servers?

Question

Do you think using an EC2 instance (Micro, 64bit) would be good for MongoDB replica sets?

Seems like if that is all they did, and with 600+ megs of RAM, one could use them for a nice set.

Also, would they make good primary (write) servers too?

My database is only 1-2 gigs now but I see it growing to 20-40 gigs this year (hopefully).

Thanks

Answer 1

Be aware that micro instances are designed for spiky CPU usage, and you will be throttled to the "low background level" if you exceed the allotment.

The AWS Micro Documentation has good information of what they are intended for.

Between the CPU and not very good IO performance my experience with using micros for development/testing has not been very good. (larger instance types have been fine though), but a micro may work for your use case.

However, there are exceptions for a config or arbiter nodes, I believe a micro should be good enough for these types of machines.

There is also some mongodb documentation specific to EC2 which might help.

Answer 2

They COULD be good - depending on your data set, but likely they will not be very good.

For starters, you dont get much RAM with those instances. Consider that you will be running an entire operating system and all related services - 613mb of RAM could get filled up very quickly.

MongoDB tries to keep as much data in RAM as possible and that wont be possible if your data set is 1-2 gigs and becomes even more of a problem if your data set grows to 20-40 gigs.

Secondly they are labeled as "Low IO performance" so when your data swaps to disk (and it will based on the size of that data set), you are going to suffer from disk reads due to low IO throughput.