Configuring disks for better I/O

In this recipe, we will be looking at the importance of provisioning your servers for better disk I/O.

Reading and writing from disks

Apart from CPU and memory (RAM), MongoDB, like most database applications, relies heavily on disk operations.

To better understand this dependency, let's look at a very simple example of reading data from a file. Suppose you have a file that contains a few thousand lines, each containing a set of strings in no particular order. If one were to write a program that is used to search a particular string, it would need to open the file, iterate through each line, and search the string. Once the string is found, the program closes the file. As disks are usually...