Question

Is it possible to suspend index maintenance in MongoDB to improve insertion speed and turn on (or rebuild) indexes afterwards? According to documentation it looks like after ensureIndex() the index maintained during all subsequent inserts and updates.

Answer 1

Indexes are updated synchronously with the insert/update. So there’s no way to “pause” this. If you’re anticipating a large batch insert, you could drop the index, perform the insert and then rebuild the index. Of course, this has some implications:

1. your queries will suffer from missing index, while you are inserting data.
2. index rebuild might be too expensive in terms of burned CPU and invalidated caches (if you have lots of data)