Your folks were wrong. They lock on the collection and only on some types of queries.

No, they lock the entire database for every write.

"MongoDB uses a readers-writer [1] lock that allows concurrent reads access to a database but gives exclusive access to a single write operation."

"Beginning with version 2.2, MongoDB implements locks on a per-database basis for most read and write operations. Some global operations, typically short lived operations involving multiple databases, still require a global “instance” wide lock. Before 2.2, there is only one “global” lock per mongod instance."

source: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/concurrency/

Yes that's the part that just kills me. It was a system-wide lock, and now it's just per-DB. I just don't see how anyone can take that seriously.

Also, why bother with a buffer pool manager when you've got mmap, right?