CouchDB n & q values I'm new to CouchDB. I'm going through its config. Current configuration is as below. 

n = 3

q = 8

I understand n = 3 means 3 nodes and q = 8 means 8 shards. I don't have a cluster in place. Is it possible to make n = 1 without affecting data consistency? (This is a production DB.)

Will it help me reduce overall DB size?
From the official documentation, the parameter n is "The number of copies there is of every document. Replicas." so if you set it to 1 you will use less space for sure. Now if this is a production environment that may not be a good idea unless you have your database on a RAID with redundancy.