Hmmm... You have a point. I have to say though that the read-write mode was not part of LMDB's original design; it was added in response to a request from a Red

Hmmm... You have a point. I have to say though that the read-write mode was not part of LMDB's original design; it was added in response to a request from a RedHat engineer. So in its purest original form, LMDB was completely incorruptible. In practice we've also found that writable mmap is only a win when your entire DB resides in RAM. When the DB is larger than RAM it's actually slower than just using write(). (When you try to write to an mmap page, if it's not already resident the OS must page it in. This is a wasted page-in since we're simply going to overwrite the entire page.)