Append / prepend: post-degradation recovery way

Couchbase Server
1

Hello!
There is an interesting case (undersized, 3 nodes, 1CPU + 1G RAM):

  1. i used very long log via append() [increment + ~80 bytes per iteration]
  2. during tests, after some time, i faced with real performance degradation (as described here: http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/server/4.1/developer-guide/raw-append-prepend.html#story-h2-2)
  3. log file size was 1.7Mb
  4. i destroyed and re-created all buckets i used.
    But:
  5. server still was under unusual heavy load (even with empty buckets)
  6. tests performance was lower then before
    I recovered with “full reinstallation” (and don’t have reasons now to investigate this case deeper; it’s easier to change data flow), but (supposing that this is known “feature” because of http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/server/4.1/developer-guide/raw-append-prepend.html#story-h2-2 ), is there a “soft way” to recover from performance degradation ?
    And: are there other known cases, that could cause similar degradation ?