When we talk about performance tuning, we must distinguish between system and query optimizations. The latter is all about writing queries differently and accessing data in different ways to reduce the time that the database takes to run the query. Further in the chapter, we will look at some specific query optimizations; so, for now, we will focus on how to tune the RethinkDB database server to improve the overall performance.
There are several isolated settings in RethinkDB's configuration file that help us do this. Although the defaults are often appropriate and guarantee the best level of safety, there might be circumstances in which you need to change them. In the following section, we will look at several of those settings.
It's important to note that RethinkDB is a distributed database so, as a general rule, performance can be boosted simply by adding nodes to the database cluster: as you've learned in the previous chapter, sharding data allows us to spread the database...