It is well beyond "slower inserts" if you are updating several million documents for a single insert - this approach makes your entire collection the active working set. Similarly, in order to do the $mod
comparison with a key value, you will have to compare every key value in the index.
Given your requirement for a sorted sampling order, I'm not sure there is a more efficient preaggregation approach you can take.
I would use skip()
and limit()
to fetch a random document. The skip()
command will be scanning from the beginning of the index to skip over unwanted documents each time, but if you have enough RAM to keep the index in memory the performance should be acceptable:
// Add an index on time field
db.data.ensureIndex({'time':1})
// Count number of documents
var dc = db.data.count()
// Iterate and sample every 1000 docs
var i = 0; var sampleSize = 1000; var results = [];
while (i < dc) {
results.push(db.data.find().sort({time:1}).skip(i).limit(1)[0]);
i += sampleSize;
}
// Result array of sampled docs
printjson(results);