We are looking at load balancing our CouchDB databases. The strategy of having one primary database that handles only writes, and multiple replicas that handle only reads, seems like a good solution to me. This site explains it pretty well:
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/scaling-couchdb/9781449304942/ch04.html
However, I have this one nagging thought. If writes only go to the primary, and reads are only from the replicas, is it possible that a user could cause an update to their data and not see it right away because of the latency of the replication? This sounds like it could happen every time, if the read comes quickly after the write.
Would it be useful (or even work) to include the primary in the list of servers that can read? Or would that be useless, or even break things worse?