Performance of Java SDK 2.x is 10x slower than SDK 1.4

we’ll have to dig deeper at your problem, because this kind of performance with the kind of hardware configuration you have indeed feels very low.

just a side note though, you are using StringDocument which will store data flagged as String in couchbase, where it should be identified as JSON (so that it can be indexed in views for instance). Prefer using RawJsonDocument for storing a String representation of a JSON object.