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Why do unbounded array growth patterns degrade performance?

Senior MongoDB
Quick Answer Unbounded arrays that grow indefinitely cause documents to grow past the 16MB limit, hurt working set efficiency (you load the whole document to read one array element), make updates expensive (updating an element in a 10,000-item array requires rewriting the array), and cause multi-key index bloat. Design pattern: use a separate collection for array items with a reference back to the parent.

Answer

Growing arrays increase document size, cause relocations, and produce heavy index rewrites, slowing reads and writes.
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