I think that more than the content of your post, siculars is responding to the somewhat inflammatory title. As soon as I saw the title I thought, "Someone is going to be complaining about mongoDB having a slow operation, and it is going to be upvoted endlessly because mongoDB is webscale." Upon closer inspection, it became clear that this title is only inflammatory because it is on HN, and also that the title was not designed for HN: on your blog, it is simply a description of what the post is about. On HN, it becomes a honeypot.

@cheald, clearly this isn't your fault, and you don't control the tenor of the discussion of mongoDB. What follows isn't a criticism of you, but more a general comment.

I don't think that criticism of mongoDB should be stifled on HN (it clearly still has huge flaws--the lack of granularity when grabbing the write lock comes to mind), but it seems like it's a little hard to have an intelligent conversation in this context. It might make sense to encourage HN to discuss mongo in a way that it's not criticizing a performance detail (no database can do everything for everyone), eg where it can be compared against other databases. When criticizing a performance detail, it might make sense to move that discussion to the MongoDB Jira, where your voice can actually help influence decision making.