That's weird, and should not have happened. I've done similar things with sqlite databases many times that size, and though the FS might have been even faster,

That's weird, and should not have happened. I've done similar things with sqlite databases many times that size, and though the FS might have been even faster, sqlite was still more than fast enough (as in, sub-10ms responses the norm). I suspect there's some way in which your access pattern or usage was suboptimal. Perhaps you had big reads with small writes in a transaction, or your network streamed directly from db leaving connections open a long time, or... something, because there's no way this should have taken so long.