Comment by NorwegianDude

15 days ago

I do t have time to test myself now, but it would be interesting to see a proper benchmark. We all know it's not suitable for high write concurrency, but SQLite should be a very good amount faster for reads because of the lack of overhead. But how much faster is it really?

as an in memory database, I got around 40,000,000 reads per second. Using WAL and a file rather than in memory, around 900,000 reads per second. This is single threaded, for a simple integer ID to string Value query, and a few years old at this point, and only minor config optimizations eg not even using memory mapped io and a ~3gb database with a million or so rows on a Windows machine. The performance really is amazing.

  • 40 million reads per second, on a single core? 40 million reads/s is 25 ns per read, that is faster than any RAM I know of.

    • It's not like every read would make a separate trip all the way to RAM, caches are a thing and SIMD pipelines/parallelizes comparisons within a hash bucket quite well. Lookups from a hash map should amortize to something like 5-20ns per lookup these days. Abseil's Swiss Tables for C++ and Rust's Hashbrown both should reach that.

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In some informal benchmarks I wrote using queries + data from a web app I develop, sqlite queries were about 5x faster than postgres.