There is a database with 9 million rows, with 3 million distinct entities. Such a database is loaded everyday into MongoDB using perl driver. It runs smoothly on the first load. However from the second, third, etc. the process is really slowed down. It blocks for long times every now and then.
I initially realised that this was because of the automatic flushing to disk every 60 seconds, so I tried setting syncdelay to 0 and I tried the nojournalling option. I have indexed the fields that are used for upsert. Also I have observed that the blocking is inconsistent and not always at the same time for the same line.
I have 17 G ram and enough hard disk space. I am replicating on two servers with one arbiter. I do not have any significant processes running in the background. Is there a solution/explanation for such blocking?
UPDATE: The mongostat tool says in the 'res' column that around 3.6 G is used.