Hold on -- if it really is "one lightweight SELECT per millisecond", and you're saying a select is "a couple hundred microseconds", say generously 200us?, then you're spending 200us out of every 1000us just selecting. That's a lot of polling!

Yeah, again, to be clear: I get how SQLite works and I'm not dunking on the design, I'm just saying the comparison set up on this page snags. It's a classic LLM negated triptych, but "one of these things is not like the other": cache pressure: bad, writer contention: bad, kernel file watcher: ... good, actually? Intuitively seems better than this design?