CVcvilsmeier·Aug 18, 2025Submission
Benchmarks for Golang SQLite Drivers
92 points · Open discussioncvilsmeier
go-sqlite-bench
Go2023–2026
cvilsmeier / go-sqlite-bench
go-sqlite-bench
Benchmarks for Golang SQLite Drivers
4Distinct people
6Mentions
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622GitHub stars
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Benchmarks for Golang SQLite Drivers
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| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesGolang does not have built in SQLite. It has a SQL database abstraction in the stdlib but you must supply a sqlite driver, for example one of these: https://github.com/cvilsmeier/go-sqlite-bench
However using the stdlib abstraction adds a lot of performance overhead; although it’ll still be competitive with CSV files.
In Poor Man's Back End-as-a-Service (BaaS), Similar to Firebase/Supabase/PocketbaseIf you're using database/sql you don't need locks around database access.
All sane Go SQLite drivers should be concurrency safe.
That said, (and I'm biased but) there's something fishy about modernc concurrency: https://github.com/cvilsmeier/go-sqlite-bench#concurrent
Querying data with 2 threads shouldn't be 2x slower than using 1 thread; 4 threads shouldn't be 6x slower; or 8 threads 15x.
The folks at GoToSocial have long maitained a conccurency fix; I don't know if it's related to this performance issue.
Still the advice about using read-only and read-write connections still holds, for all drivers.
Why? Because in SQLite reads can be concurrent, but writes are exclusive. If you're using WAL, a single write can be concurrent with many reads, otherwise a writer also blocks readers. And SQLite handles all of this.
But SQLite locks are pol
Read the rest
ling locks: a connection tries to acquire a lock; if it can't, it sleeps for a bit and tries again; rinse, repeat. When the other connection finally releases its lock, everyone else is sleeping. There's a lot of sleeping involved; also with exponential backoff.
Using read-only and read-write connections "fixes" this. Make the read-only a pool of N connections, and the read-write a single connection. Then, all waiting will be in Go channels, which is fast at waking waiters, and doesn't involve needless sleeping/pooling. As a bonus, context cancellation will be respected for this kind of blocking.
On this final point, my driver goes to great lengths to respect context cancellation, both of CPU queries (which you need to forcefully interrupt), and busy waiting on locks (which also doesn't work for most other drivers). So you can set a large busy timeout (one minute is the default) with the confidence that cancellation will work regardless. The dual connection strategy still offers performance benefits, though.