SQLite as a production database for a low-traffic site?

Question

I'm considering using SQLite as a production database for a site that would receive perhaps 20 simultaneous users, but with the potential for a peak that could be many multiples of that (since the site would be accessible on the open internet and there's always a possibility that someone will post a link somewhere that could drive many people to the site all at once).

Is SQLite a possibility?

I know it's not an ideal production scenario. I'm only asking if this is within the realm of being a realistic possibility.

Answer 1

SQLite doesn't support any kind of concurrency, so you may have problems running it on a production website. If you're looking for a 'lighter' database, perhaps consider trying a contemporary object-document store like CouchDB.

By all means, continue to develop against SQLite, and you're probably fine to use it initially. If you find your application has more users down the track, you're going to want to transition to Postgres or MySQL however.

The author of SQLite addresses this on the website:

SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic.

The SQLite website (https://www.sqlite.org/) uses SQLite itself, of course, and as of this writing (2015), it handles about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below 0.1 most of the time.

So I think the long and short of it is, go for it, and if it's not working well for you, making the transition to an enterprise-class database is fairly trivial anyway. Do take care of your schema, however, and design your database with growth and efficiency in mind.

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Here's a thread with some more independent comments around using SQLite for a production web application. It sounds like it has been used with some mixed results.

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Edit (2014):

Since this answer was posted, SQLite now features a multi-threaded mode and write ahead logging mode which may influence your evaluation of its suitability for low-medium traffic sites.

Charles Leifer has written a blog post about SQLite's WAL (write ahead logging) feature and some well-considered opinions on appropriate use cases.

Answer 2

The small excerpt from SQLite website says it all.

• Is the data separated from the application by a network? → choose client/server

• Many concurrent writers? → choose client/server

• Big data? → choose client/server

• Otherwise → choose SQLite!

SQLite "just works" (until it doesn't of course)