alt Hacker NewsThere is some risk that, if you design your website to use a local database (sqlite, or a traditional database over a unix socket on the same machine), then switching later to a networked database is harder. In other words, once you design a system to do 200 queries per page, you’d essentially have to redesign the whole thing to switch later.
It seems like it mostly comes down to how likely it is that the site will grow large enough to need a networked database. And people probably wildly overestimate this. HackerNews, for example, runs on a single computer.
Replies
The thing is sqlite can scale further vertically than most network databases. In some context's like writes and interactive transactions it outright scales further. [1]
That's before you even get into sharding sqlite.
[1] - https://andersmurphy.com/2025/12/02/100000-tps-over-a-billio...
There's also the alternative of having a cluster with one local DB in each node
The same is true for regular databases though, isn't it?
Network adds latency and while it might be fine to run 500 queries with the database being on the same machine, adding 1-5ms per query makes it feel not okay.
I don't see how anyone would design a system that executes 200 queries per page. I understand having a system that is ín use for many many years and accumulates a lot of legacy code eventually ends up there, but designing? Never. That's not design, that's doing a bad job at design.