What's great
I've been using Ableton since 2013, and it remains my go-to DAW after 10+ years. The UI is intuitive and it's still a pleasure to work in. The native plugins are exceptional quality and cover most production needs without requiring third-party tools. The workflow is efficient, and the learning curve is manageable for both beginners and professionals.
What needs improvement
GNU/Linux support would be a welcome addition for broader accessibility.
How good is the stock sample library quality?
Stock sample library is solid and production-ready. Quality is consistently high. I rarely feel limited by what's included, the samples are useful and well organised.
Are third-party plugins stable and well supported?
Yes, third-party plugin compatibility is reliable. I've used numerous VSTs without stability issues. Ableton's plugin support is straightforward, and the integration feels seamless, no complains there.
Are audio warping and time-stretching transparent enough?
Absolutely, Ableton's audio warping and time-stretching are excellent. The algorithms are transparent and reliable. I've warped countless samples over the years without noticeable issues. The Warp modes handle different material well, whether it's drums, vocals, or melodic content.
What's great
How easily does MongoDB scale for sudden traffic spikes?
It scales horizontally via sharding on a well-chosen shard key. For sudden spikes, ensure your shard key distributes writes evenly (avoid monotonic keys like timestamps). Vertically, increase replica set resources. Remember to use connection pooling to handle connection storms. Atlas auto-scaling can help, but sharding strategy matters most.
What backup and point-in-time restore options exist?
Atlas (managed service) has daily backups with 35 day retention and point-in-time recovery (PITR) using oplog snapshots. For self-hosted (like i usually do), you can use mongodump for logical backups, filesystem snapshots for physical backups, or set up replica sets with oplog-based PITR. The oplog approach is preferred for production since it lets you restore to any moment within the oplog window (typically 24 hours by default, it's configurable).
What are best practices for change streams performance?
aggregation pipelines in change streams to filter events server-side rather than client-side.
Enable resumable change streams with resume tokens to handle network interruptions gracefully.
Monitor oplog size, if it's too small, resume tokens expire quickly.
Consider sharded clusters for better throughput; change streams scale better there.
Batch process events rather than handling them one at a time.