While browsing the source code of the ELMAH mongoDB provider, I learned about a special type of collections: capped collections.

From the mongoDB documentation:

Capped collections are fixed sized collections that have a very high performance auto-FIFO age-out feature (age out is based on insertion order). In addition, capped collections automatically, with high performance, maintain insertion order for the documents in the collection; this is very powerful for certain use cases such as logging.

This is such a killer feature. Logging to the database can be extremely useful, but also rather expensive. Using this feature, you can turn on database logging without too many worries.

Insertion into a capped collection is ridiculously fast. To get an idea of how fast it really is, I did some measuring on my own humble machine. I managed to insert 10.000 small documents in less than 3.7 seconds. The headaches of tweaking buffer sizes and rolling asynchronous appenders seem to be miles away.

Something which religiously gets ignored until shit hits the fan, is log table maintenance. With a capped collection there is no need to set up a database job that periodically cleans the logging table. You just set a fixed size, and you’re done. No more middle-of-the-night support calls when the logging table is eating up all the disk space.

Creating a capped collection with the C# driver can look like this.

var server = MongoServer.Create("mongodb://localhost/");
var db = server.GetDatabase("PlayGround");

var options = CollectionOptions
    .SetCapped(true)
    .SetMaxSize(5000)
    .SetMaxDocuments(100);

if (!db.CollectionExists("Log"))
    db.CreateCollection("Log", options);

Now that’s easy sailing.