Can Mongo be deployed to production on one server?

Question

I don't want to rent another server...

But wikipedia says:

MongoDB should never be deployed on fewer than two servers[citation needed]: a master and a slave. A master can perform reads and writes. A slave copies data from the master and can only be used for reads or backup (not writes).

Answer 1

That's quite outdated. With 1.8 you have single node durability, see --journal.

Answer 2

With the current release, you can indeed use a single server thanks to Journaling. Technically you always could use only one server, however, due lack of journaling, your database could become corrupted.

A word of advice. create a replica set on your single server with. You can create multiple mongo instances on one machine. You can create a primary (master), secondary (slave), and a arbiter. This way you can shut down the slave on occasions and copy the DB files for backups, and if for some reason one of the other processes gets shut down, your app will still be able to connect to the DB.

Answer 3

I think the new recommended environment for mongo in production involves "replica sets", which is actually at minimum three servers. If the primary server goes down, the other two servers elect one of them to take over. When the original primary comes back online, another election is held, and a new primary is selected.

I'm not sure if master-slave is deprecated, but I think if you're building mongo fresh, you should consider building a replica set.

If you really don't want more servers, then you may consider running all secondaries side-by-side on the same server as the primary (but on different ports). However, this isn't very redundant.

Answer 4

I think it depends on the use that you need to do of the mongodb...

The reason of the wikipedia suggestion is that with mongoDb (until version 1.3.1) you couldn't make a backup without sopping the database first.

From 1.3.1 onward you can do a backup locking writes :

MongoDB v1.3.1 and higher supports an fsync and lock command with which we can flush writes, lock the database to prevent writing, and then backup the datafiles.

While in this locked mode, all writes will block. If this is a problem consider one of the other methods below.

If you have high usage of your application with many accesses deploying on two server it's the better way, whereas instead you have an application that is used only during the day, you could stop or lock the database, make a backup, then restart or unlock in the nightly hours ...