SQLite in production: crazy or genius?

Rails 8 made SQLite a first-class citizen for production with Solid Cache, Solid Queue, and Solid Cable. I've been running a modest app (~500 daily users) on SQLite for three months now.

Results:
- Latency is fantastic (no network hop to a DB server)
- Simpler infrastructure (no Postgres/Redis to manage)
- Backups are just file copies

The tradeoff is you can't horizontally scale your web servers easily, but for many apps that's fine.

Anyone else running SQLite in prod?

Comments (4)

I've been doing the same for a small internal tool. Zero issues so far. The simplicity of the infrastructure is hard to overstate.

dan_codes

What about concurrent writes? That's always been my concern with SQLite in web apps.

ivy_league

Good question! With WAL mode (which Rails enables by default now), concurrent reads are fine. Writes are serialized but for most apps that's fast enough. I'm seeing ~5ms per write.

hank_the_tank

This is what we're using for this forum actually! Works great so far.