The article discusses ec2 so I can tell you at least this much. The flush FS commands will get translated into storage system commands to ensure blocks are wri

The article discusses ec2 so I can tell you at least this much. The flush FS commands will get translated into storage system commands to ensure blocks are written through to the disk. When using network-attached storage, like EBS, the minimum latency will likely be determined by the network latency(and the bulk of all the latency will likely be network) involved and sending these commands and waiting for the ack. If using WAL halves the number of times this needs to occur, you should see double the number of serial transactions per second. 1-2% slower on reads is likely as insignificant as it sounds, particularly if your write load has you interested in double the number of write qps; possibly without changing a single schema or line of code! Edit: This is generalized information though. I would like to see some actual SQLite numbers and I disagree with the article's generalization that SQLite is best suited for applications that "Are read-heavy but not write-heavy".