1: make the "first level" have more thatn 2^5 entries (controlled by the constant TOP_LEVEL in lsm_btree.hrl); this means a new set of files is opened/closed/merged for every 32 insert/updates/deletes. Setting this higher will just make the nursery correspondingly larger, which should be absolutely fine.
2: Right now, the streaming btree writer emits a btree page based on number of elements. This could be changed to be based on the size of the node (say, some block-size boudary) and then add padding at the end so that each node read becomes a clean block transfer. Right now, we're probably taking way to many reads.
3: Also, there is no caching of read nodes. So every time a btree node is visited it is also read from disk and term_to_binary'ed. But we need a caching system for that to work well (https://github.com/cliffmoon/cherly is difficult to build), it needs to be rebar-ified.
4: Also, the format for btree nodes could probably be optimized. Right now it's just binary_to_term of a key/value list as far as I remember. Perhaps we dont have to deserialize the entire thing.
5: It might also be good to employ a scheduler (github.com/esl/jobs<http://github.com/esl/jobs>) for issuing merges; because I think that it can be a problem for the OS if there are too many merges going on at the same time.