Choosing WAL vs Rollback Journal for High‑Frequency Small Transactions

Choosing WAL vs Rollback Journal for High‑Frequency Small Transactions

The application needs a multi‑threaded SQLite database that serves many concurrent read connections while handling a high rate of small write transactions.

Rollback Journal mode forces an exclusive lock on writes, blocking all readers until commit, whereas WAL mode permits concurrent reads with a single writer but requires periodic checkpointing that may add latency.

• Does WAL mode provide a sustainable performance advantage over Rollback Journal when write frequency is high but transaction size is small?
• Under what specific concurrency loads does frequent checkpointing in WAL mode create latency spikes that outweigh the benefit of non‑blocking reads?