Indeed on rereading my question I see it was not phrased correctly. Yes, the `journal_size_limit` affects the maximum journal/wal file that remains on disk if

Indeed on rereading my question I see it was not phrased correctly. Yes, the `journal_size_limit` affects the maximum journal/wal file that remains on disk if larger than that — and by the way ensures that these files are not deleted once created. Your setting it to ~25MiB while the default `wal_autocheckpoint` PRAGMA is set to 1000 pages (with the typical page size of 4KiB that means after ~4MiB the WAL file contents will get moved to the main database file if no other transaction is active) is what confused me. 25MiB seems very specific for a file size to keep in the occasion that the WAL file keeps growing beyond 4MiB. Perhaps you also meant to tinker with the `wal_autocheckpoint` PRAGMA but didn't?