You should compress the individual article texts with zlib. Right now, looking up an article text for a decent size article ("Virus") takes 10 round-trips-- 5 a

You should compress the individual article texts with zlib. Right now, looking up an article text for a decent size article ("Virus") takes 10 round-trips-- 5 appear to be btree traversals, but another 5 (!) are to read in the page content, as chunks of 8K 8K 16K 32K 64K. Compressing the article might cut one round trip off that Increasing the sqlite page size to a much larger size like 64KB or 128KB may improve average latency too, since fewer btree pages would need to be fetched to find the offset of the desired row, and most page contents could be read with one fetch. This matters more when fetches over the network take ~100ms.