I never heard about TokuMX, but now I simply hope MongoDB, Inc will use their $150M to buy that little company or integrate their changes (why not, as they are open sourced!).
This request (collection level locking) was created almost 4 years ago! And it is still not even planned yet...

We are also going to have to change database engines because of MongoDB's pitiful locking contention and performance. I'd love to see some hints as to what these "lots of methods" are since I can only see three:

• Make each document bigger instead of several smaller ones
• Use more databases
• Use more machines (shards)

I did try TokuMX about a month ago. It had drastically smaller database size (mongodump bson was ~360GB, Toku only needed 53GB including indexes to store that). The import and index generation was a lot faster too. However it fell over with an internal locking error when running an overnight job (about 100:1 reads versus writes).

I made the mistake to assume that locking was the bottleneck. I tried TokuMX, and found no improvement, perhaps only a little better concurrency and smaller footprint. Upon further benchmarking, profiling and testing I found that it was my own bad design which led to the bad performance. Furthermore, I would not recommend TokuMX as it is currently prone to crashes on a "Stable" release.

I've been getting much (10-20%) improved performance with the new 2.6.0-rc0 branch.

@Eliot Horowitz - Is there any updated documentation to support the multi-index queries enhancement that you mention? I would quite like to understand how it works as it may be incredibly beneficial for me. I can't see any information on this in the 2.6 docs (yet). Thanks

Ben Brockway: the new index intersection feature is mentioned in the 2.6 release notes under Query Engine Improvements.

If anyone has further questions on MongoDB 2.6 or other topics, can you please post to the mongodb-user discussion group? Comments on this Jira issue should be kept relevant to the "collection level locking" feature request, and your questions will also have more visibility on the community forum.

Thanks,
Stephen