SQLite Concurrency WAL

Discussions center on SQLite's handling of concurrent reads and writes across multiple processes or threads, with repeated emphasis on enabling WAL mode to mitigate locking issues and improve performance.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Databases
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Keywords

RAFT IMHO DBA S3 wal.html SSH BEGIN appfileformat.html actordb.com IMO sqlite wal writers mode concurrent write readers database writes raft

Sample Comments

webmobdev Apr 15, 2021 View on HN

Kind of - your web application needs to partially handle that, and SQLite also depends on the OS filesystem to handle concurrent access.

jasonjayr May 4, 2018 View on HN

You'll want to turn on write-ahead logging for that scenario[1][1]: https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html

jsmeaton Apr 29, 2023 View on HN

I assume you’re asking about concurrent writes and yes, if you use WAL mode you can have that too.https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html

soamv May 21, 2025 View on HN

Yes, but: https://sqlite.org/wal.html

thomascgalvin Dec 8, 2022 View on HN

No, because of SQLite's locking mechanism. It uses filesytem-level constructs to support concurrency, and this gets dicey, quickly.

Gabrys1 Jan 24, 2026 View on HN

if your data isn't mostly read-only, then you're going to have an issue with SQLite. It doesn't nicely support parallel writers

speedgoose Apr 6, 2024 View on HN

SQLite in WAL mode would manage for sure.

bawolff Jul 15, 2025 View on HN

I think this is mentioned in the docs https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html

miguelgrinberg Jun 28, 2022 View on HN

SQLite isn't running in WAL mode. This application isn't just read-heavy, it is ready-only for users, so I wouldn't think this will make a difference. The writes occur while everybody is sleeping, from a cron job that runs once a day to upload the traffic for the previous 24 hs.

leo_santagada Jun 20, 2016 View on HN

Were you using wal mode with sqlite? It helps a lot with locking.