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I use SQLite/Litestream for https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com! Serves about 120m requests per month (most of those are cached and don't hit the
by Glench 3y ago
I use SQLite/Litestream for https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com! Serves about 120m requests per month (most of those are cached and don't hit the db), but it's been great!
I have no affiliation with Litestream but I was convinced that SQLite could be a viable db option from this great post about it called Consider SQLite: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite
Using SQLite with Litestream helped me to launch the site quickly without having to pay for or configure/manage a db server, especially when I didn't know if the site would make any money and didn't have any personal experience with running production databases. Litestream streams to blackblaze b2 for literally $0 per month which is great. I already had a backblaze account for personal backups and it was easy to just add b2 storage. I've never had to restore from backup so far.
There's a pleasing operational simplicity in this setup — one $14 DigitalOcean droplet serves my entire app (single-threaded still!) and it's been easy to scale vertically by just upgrading the server to the next tier when I started pushing the limits of a droplet. DigitalOcean's "premium" intel and amd droplets use NVMe drives which seem to be especially good with SQLite.
One downside of using SQLite is that there's just not as much community knowledge about using and tuning it for web applications. For example, I'm using it with SvelteKit and there's not much written online about deploying multi-threaded SvelteKit apps with SQLite. Also, not many example configs to learn from. By far the biggest performance improvement I found was turning on memory mapping for SQLite.
Happy to answer any questions you might have!
- ramraj07 3y agoThanks a lot, this is roughly the path I was also hoping to take and happy to hear it's not unfounded. I am planning on a python backend though which does both add more documentation in some ways but adds performance issues in others. But I'll be happy to worry about the performance problem when it arises! My goal is also to try and create an app that I don't expect to immediately be successful so it has to be cheap to run in the long term!