MMAPv1

MMAPv1 is quite mature and has proven to be quite stable over the years. One of the storage allocation strategies used with this engine is the power of two allocation strategy. This primarily involves storing double the amount of document space (in power of twos) such that in-place updates of documents become highly likely without having to move the documents during updates. Another storage strategy used with this engine is fixed sizing. In this, the documents are padded (for example, with zeros) such that maximum data allocation for each document is attained. This strategy is usually followed by applications that have fewer updates.

Consistency in MMAPv1 is achieved by journaling, where writes are written to a private view in memory which are written to the on-disk journal. Upon which the changes are then written to a shared view that is the data files. There is no support for data compression with MMAPv1. Lastly, MMAPv1 heavily relies on page caches and hence uses up available memory to retain the working dataset in cache thus providing good performance. Although, MongoDB does yield (free up) memory, used for cache, if another process demands it. Some production deployments avoid enabling swap space to ensure these caches are not written to disk which may deteriorate performance.