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+35% Faster Than The Filesystem
+</div>
+<div class="fancy_toc">
+<a onclick="toggle_toc()">
+<span class="fancy_toc_mark" id="toc_mk">&#x25ba;</span>
+Table Of Contents
+</a>
+<div id="toc_sub"><div class="fancy-toc1"><a href="#summary">1. Summary</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc2"><a href="#caveats">1.1. Caveats</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc2"><a href="#related_studies">1.2. Related Studies</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc1"><a href="#how_these_measurements_are_made">2. How These Measurements Are Made</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc2"><a href="#read_performance_measurements">2.1. Read Performance Measurements</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc2"><a href="#write_performance_measurements">2.2. Write Performance Measurements</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc2"><a href="#variations">2.3. Variations</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc1"><a href="#general_findings">3. General Findings</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc1"><a href="#additional_notes">4. Additional Notes</a></div>
+<div class="fancy-toc2"><a href="#compiling_and_testing_on_android">4.1. Compiling And Testing on Android</a></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<script>
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+</script>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1 id="summary"><span>1. </span>Summary</h1>
+
+<p>SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images)
+<a href="#approx">35% faster&sup1;</a> than the same blobs
+can be read from or written to individual files on disk using
+fread() or fwrite().
+
+</p><p>Furthermore, a single SQLite database holding
+10-kilobyte blobs uses about 20% less disk space than
+storing the blobs in individual files.
+
+</p><p>The performance difference arises (we believe) because when
+working from an SQLite database, the open() and close() system calls
+are invoked only once, whereas
+open() and close() are invoked once for each blob
+when using blobs stored in individual files. It appears that the
+overhead of calling open() and close() is greater than the overhead
+of using the database. The size reduction arises from the fact that
+individual files are padded out to the next multiple of the filesystem
+block size, whereas the blobs are packed more tightly into an SQLite
+database.
+
+</p><p>
+The measurements in this article were made during the week of 2017-06-05
+using a version of SQLite in between 3.19.2 and 3.20.0. You may expect
+future versions of SQLite to perform even better.
+
+</p><h2 id="caveats"><span>1.1. </span>Caveats</h2>
+
+<a name="approx"></a>
+<p>
+&sup1;The 35% figure above is approximate. Actual timings vary
+depending on hardware, operating system, and the
+details of the experiment, and due to random performance fluctuations
+on real-world hardware. See the text below for more detail.
+Try the experiments yourself. Report significant deviations on
+the <a href="support.html#fx">SQLite forum</a>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The 35% figure is based on running tests on every machine
+that the author has easily at hand.
+Some reviewers of this article report that SQLite has higher
+latency than direct I/O on their systems. We do not yet understand
+the difference. We also see indications that SQLite does not
+perform as well as direct I/O when experiments are run using
+a cold filesystem cache.
+
+</p><p>
+So let your take-away be this: read/write latency for
+SQLite is competitive with read/write latency of individual files on
+disk. Often SQLite is faster. Sometimes SQLite is almost
+as fast. Either way, this article disproves the common
+assumption that a relational database must be slower than direct
+filesystem I/O.
+
+</p><h2 id="related_studies"><span>1.2. </span>Related Studies</h2>
+
+<p>
+A <a href="https://golangexample.com/an-unscientific-benchmark-of-sqlite-vs-the-file-system-btrfs/">2022 study</a>
+(<a href="https://github.com/chrisdavies/dbench">alternative link on GitHub</a>) found that
+SQLite is <i>roughly</i> twice as fast at real-world workloads compared to Btrfs and Ext4 on Linux.
+
+</p><p>
+<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/gray/">Jim Gray</a>
+and others studied the read performance of BLOBs
+versus file I/O for Microsoft SQL Server and found that reading BLOBs
+out of the
+database was faster for BLOB sizes less than between 250KiB and 1MiB.
+(<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/to-blob-or-not-to-blob-large-object-storage-in-a-database-or-a-filesystem/">Paper</a>).
+In that study, the database still stores the filename of the content even
+if the content is held in a separate file. So the database is consulted
+for every BLOB, even if it is only to extract the filename. In this
+article, the key for the BLOB is the filename, so no preliminary database
+access is required. Because the database is never used at all when
+reading content from individual files in this article, the threshold
+at which direct file I/O becomes faster is smaller than it is in Gray's
+paper.
+
+</p><p>
+The <a href="intern-v-extern-blob.html">Internal Versus External BLOBs</a> article on this website is an
+earlier investigation (circa 2011) that uses the same approach as the
+Jim Gray paper &mdash; storing the blob filenames as entries in the
+database &mdash; but for SQLite instead of SQL Server.
+
+
+
+</p><h1 id="how_these_measurements_are_made"><span>2. </span>How These Measurements Are Made</h1>
+
+<p>I/O performance is measured using the
+<a href="https://www.sqlite.org/src/file/test/kvtest.c">kvtest.c</a> program
+from the SQLite source tree.
+To compile this test program, first gather the kvtest.c source file
+into a directory with the <a href="amalgamation.html">SQLite amalgamation</a> source
+files "sqlite3.c" and "sqlite3.h". Then on unix, run a command like
+the following:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>gcc -Os -I. -DSQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ &#92;
+ kvtest.c sqlite3.c -o kvtest -ldl -lpthread
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>Or on Windows with MSVC:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>cl -I. -DSQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ kvtest.c sqlite3.c
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>Instructions for compiling for Android
+are <a href="#compile-android">shown below</a>.
+
+</p><p>
+Use the resulting "kvtest" program to
+generate a test database with 100,000 random uncompressible
+blobs, each with a random
+size between 8,000 and 12,000 bytes
+using a command like this:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>./kvtest init test1.db --count 100k --size 10k --variance 2k
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>
+If desired, you can verify the new database by running this command:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>./kvtest stat test1.db
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>
+Next, make copies of all the blobs into individual files in a directory
+using a command like this:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>./kvtest export test1.db test1.dir
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>
+At this point, you can measure the amount of disk space used by
+the test1.db database and the space used by the test1.dir directory
+and all of its content. On a standard Ubuntu Linux desktop, the
+database file will be 1,024,512,000 bytes in size and the test1.dir
+directory will use 1,228,800,000 bytes of space (according to "du -k"),
+about 20% more than the database.
+
+</p><p>
+The "test1.dir" directory created above puts all the blobs into a single
+folder. It was conjectured that some operating systems would perform
+poorly when a single directory contains 100,000 objects. To test this,
+the kvtest program can also store the blobs in a hierarchy of folders with no
+more than 100 files and/or subdirectories per folder. The alternative
+on-disk representation of the blobs can be created using the --tree
+command-line option to the "export" command, like this:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>./kvtest export test1.db test1.tree --tree
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>
+The test1.dir directory will contain 100,000 files
+with names like "000000", "000001", "000002" and so forth but the
+test1.tree directory will contain the same files in subdirectories like
+"00/00/00", "00/00/01", and so on. The test1.dir and test1.test
+directories take up approximately the same amount of space, though
+test1.test is very slightly larger due to the extra directory entries.
+
+</p><p>
+All of the experiments that follow operate the same with either
+"test1.dir" or "test1.tree". Very little performance difference is
+measured in either case, regardless of operating system.
+
+</p><p>
+Measure the performance for reading blobs from the database and from
+individual files using these commands:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>./kvtest run test1.db --count 100k --blob-api
+./kvtest run test1.dir --count 100k --blob-api
+./kvtest run test1.tree --count 100k --blob-api
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>
+Depending on your hardware and operating system, you should see that reads
+from the test1.db database file are about 35% faster than reads from
+individual files in the test1.dir or test1.tree folders. Results can vary
+significantly from one run to the next due to caching, so it is advisable
+to run tests multiple times and take an average or a worst case or a best
+case, depending on your requirements.
+
+</p><p>The --blob-api option on the database read test causes kvtest to use
+the <a href="c3ref/blob_read.html">sqlite3_blob_read()</a> feature of SQLite to load the content of the
+blobs, rather than running pure SQL statements. This helps SQLite to run
+a little faster on read tests. You can omit that option to compare the
+performance of SQLite running SQL statements.
+In that case, the SQLite still out-performs direct reads, though
+by not as much as when using <a href="c3ref/blob_read.html">sqlite3_blob_read()</a>.
+The --blob-api option is ignored for tests that read from individual disk
+files.
+
+</p><p>
+Measure write performance by adding the --update option. This causes
+the blobs are overwritten in place with another random blob of
+exactly the same size.
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>./kvtest run test1.db --count 100k --update
+./kvtest run test1.dir --count 100k --update
+./kvtest run test1.tree --count 100k --update
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>
+The writing test above is not completely fair, since SQLite is doing
+<a href="transactional.html">power-safe transactions</a> whereas the direct-to-disk writing is not.
+To put the tests on a more equal footing, add either the --nosync
+option to the SQLite writes to disable calling fsync() or
+FlushFileBuffers() to force content to disk, or using the --fsync option
+for the direct-to-disk tests to force them to invoke fsync() or
+FlushFileBuffers() when updating disk files.
+
+</p><p>
+By default, kvtest runs the database I/O measurements all within
+a single transaction. Use the --multitrans option to run each blob
+read or write in a separate transaction. The --multitrans option makes
+SQLite much slower, and uncompetitive with direct disk I/O. This
+option proves, yet again, that to get the most performance out of
+SQLite, you should group as much database interaction as possible within
+a single transaction.
+
+</p><p>
+There are many other testing options, which can be seen by running
+the command:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>./kvtest help
+</pre></div>
+
+<h2 id="read_performance_measurements"><span>2.1. </span>Read Performance Measurements</h2>
+
+<p>The chart below shows data collected using
+<a href="https://www.sqlite.org/src/file/test/kvtest.c">kvtest.c</a> on five different
+systems:
+
+</p><ul>
+<li><b>Win7</b>: A circa-2009 Dell Inspiron laptop, Pentium dual-core
+ at 2.30GHz, 4GiB RAM, Windows7.
+</li><li><b>Win10</b>: A 2016 Lenovo YOGA 910, Intel i7-7500 at 2.70GHz,
+ 16GiB RAM, Windows10.
+</li><li><b>Mac</b>: A 2015 MacBook Pro, 3.1GHz intel Core i7, 16GiB RAM,
+ MacOS 10.12.5
+</li><li><b>Ubuntu</b>: Desktop built from Intel i7-4770K at 3.50GHz, 32GiB RAM,
+ Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
+</li><li><b>Android</b>: Galaxy S3, ARMv7, 2GiB RAM
+</li></ul>
+
+<p>All machines use SSD except Win7 which has a
+hard-drive. The test database is 100K blobs with sizes uniformly
+distributed between 8K and 12K, for a total of about 1 gigabyte
+of content. The database page size
+is 4KiB. The -DSQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ compile-time option was
+used for all of these tests.
+Tests were run multiple times.
+The first run was used to warm up the cache and its timings were discarded.
+
+</p><p>
+The chart below shows average time to read a blob directly from the
+filesystem versus the time needed to read the same blob from the SQLite
+database.
+The actual timings vary considerably from one system to another
+(the Ubuntu desktop is much
+faster than the Galaxy S3 phone, for example).
+This chart shows the ratio of the
+times needed to read blobs from a file divided by the time needed to
+from the database. The left-most column in the chart is the normalized
+time to read from the database, for reference.
+
+</p><p>
+In this chart, an SQL statement ("SELECT v FROM kv WHERE k=?1")
+is prepared once. Then for each blob, the blob key value is bound
+to the ?1 parameter and the statement is evaluated to extract the
+blob content.
+
+</p><p>
+The chart shows that on Windows10, content can be read from the SQLite
+database about 5 times faster than it can be read directly from disk.
+On Android, SQLite is only about 35% faster than reading from disk.
+
+</p><center>
+<div class="imgcontainer">
+<img src="images/faster-read-sql.jpg">
+</div>
+<br>
+Chart 1: SQLite read latency relative to direct filesystem reads.<br>
+100K blobs, avg 10KB each, random order using SQL
+</center>
+
+<p>
+The performance can be improved slightly by bypassing the SQL layer
+and reading the blob content directly using the
+<a href="c3ref/blob_read.html">sqlite3_blob_read()</a> interface, as shown in the next chart:
+
+</p><center>
+<div class="imgcontainer">
+<img src="images/faster-read-blobapi.jpg">
+</div>
+<br>
+Chart 2: SQLite read latency relative to direct filesystem reads.<br>
+100K blobs, avg size 10KB, random order<br>
+using sqlite3_blob_read().
+</center>
+
+<p>
+Further performance improves can be made by using the
+<a href="mmap.html">memory-mapped I/O</a> feature of SQLite. In the next chart, the
+entire 1GB database file is memory mapped and blobs are read
+(in random order) using the <a href="c3ref/blob_read.html">sqlite3_blob_read()</a> interface.
+With these optimizations, SQLite is twice as fast as Android
+or MacOS-X and over 10 times faster than Windows.
+
+</p><center>
+<div class="imgcontainer">
+<img src="images/faster-read-mmap.jpg">
+</div>
+<br>
+Chart 3: SQLite read latency relative to direct filesystem reads.<br>
+100K blobs, avg size 10KB, random order<br>
+using sqlite3_blob_read() from a memory-mapped database.
+</center>
+
+<p>
+The third chart shows that reading blob content out of SQLite can be
+twice as fast as reading from individual files on disk for Mac and
+Android, and an amazing ten times faster for Windows.
+
+</p><h2 id="write_performance_measurements"><span>2.2. </span>Write Performance Measurements</h2>
+
+<p>
+Writes are slower.
+On all systems, using both direct I/O and SQLite, write performance is
+between 5 and 15 times slower than reads.
+
+</p><p>
+Write performance measurements were made by replacing (overwriting)
+an entire blob with a different blob. All of the blobs in these
+experiment are random and incompressible. Because writes are so much
+slower than reads, only 10,000 of the 100,000 blobs in the database
+are replaced. The blobs to be replaced are selected at random and
+are in no particular order.
+
+</p><p>
+The direct-to-disk writes are accomplished using fopen()/fwrite()/fclose().
+By default, and in all the results shown below, the OS filesystem buffers are
+never flushed to persistent storage using fsync() or
+FlushFileBuffers(). In other words, there is no attempt to make the
+direct-to-disk writes transactional or power-safe.
+We found that invoking fsync() or FlushFileBuffers() on each file
+written causes direct-to-disk storage
+to be about 10 times or more slower than writes to SQLite.
+
+</p><p>
+The next chart compares SQLite database updates in <a href="wal.html">WAL mode</a>
+against raw direct-to-disk overwrites of separate files on disk.
+The <a href="pragma.html#pragma_synchronous">PRAGMA synchronous</a> setting is NORMAL.
+All database writes are in a single transaction.
+The timer for the database writes is stopped after the transaction
+commits, but before a <a href="wal.html#ckpt">checkpoint</a> is run.
+Note that the SQLite writes, unlike the direct-to-disk writes,
+are <a href="transactional.html">transactional</a> and <a href="transactional.html">power-safe</a>, though because the synchronous
+setting is NORMAL instead of FULL, the transactions are not durable.
+
+</p><center>
+<div class="imgcontainer">
+<img src="images/faster-write-safe.jpg">
+</div>
+<br>
+Chart 4: SQLite write latency relative to direct filesystem writes.<br>
+10K blobs, avg size 10KB, random order,<br>
+WAL mode with synchronous NORMAL,<br>
+exclusive of checkpoint time
+</center>
+
+<p>
+The android performance numbers for the write experiments are omitted
+because the performance tests on the Galaxy S3 are so random. Two
+consecutive runs of the exact same experiment would give wildly different
+times. And, to be fair, the performance of SQLite on android is slightly
+slower than writing directly to disk.
+
+</p><p>
+The next chart shows the performance of SQLite versus direct-to-disk
+when transactions are disabled (<a href="pragma.html#pragma_journal_mode">PRAGMA journal_mode=OFF</a>)
+and <a href="pragma.html#pragma_synchronous">PRAGMA synchronous</a> is set to OFF. These settings put SQLite on an
+equal footing with direct-to-disk writes, which is to say they make the
+data prone to corruption due to system crashes and power failures.
+
+</p><center>
+<div class="imgcontainer">
+<img src="images/faster-write-unsafe.jpg">
+</div>
+<br>
+Chart 5: SQLite write latency relative to direct filesystem writes.<br>
+10K blobs, avg size 10KB, random order,<br>
+journaling disabled, synchronous OFF.
+</center>
+
+<p>
+In all of the write tests, it is important to disable anti-virus software
+prior to running the direct-to-disk performance tests. We found that
+anti-virus software slows down direct-to-disk by an order of magnitude
+whereas it impacts SQLite writes very little. This is probably due to the
+fact that direct-to-disk changes thousands of separate files which all need
+to be checked by anti-virus, whereas SQLite writes only changes the single
+database file.
+
+</p><h2 id="variations"><span>2.3. </span>Variations</h2>
+
+<p>The <a href="compile.html#direct_overflow_read">-DSQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ</a> compile-time option causes SQLite
+to bypass its page cache when reading content from overflow pages. This
+helps database reads of 10K blobs run a little faster, but not all that much
+faster. SQLite still holds a speed advantage over direct filesystem reads
+without the SQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ compile-time option.
+
+</p><p>Other compile-time options such as using -O3 instead of -Os or
+using <a href="compile.html#threadsafe">-DSQLITE_THREADSAFE=0</a> and/or some of the other
+<a href="compile.html#rcmd">recommended compile-time options</a> might help SQLite to run even faster
+relative to direct filesystem reads.
+
+</p><p>The size of the blobs in the test data affects performance.
+The filesystem will generally be faster for larger blobs, since
+the overhead of open() and close() is amortized over more bytes of I/O,
+whereas the database will be more efficient in both speed and space
+as the average blob size decreases.
+
+
+</p><h1 id="general_findings"><span>3. </span>General Findings</h1>
+
+<ol type="A">
+<li>
+<p>SQLite is competitive with, and usually faster than, blobs stored in
+separate files on disk, for both reading and writing.
+
+</p></li><li>
+<p>SQLite is much faster than direct writes to disk on Windows
+when anti-virus protection is turned on. Since anti-virus software
+is and should be on by default in Windows, that means that SQLite
+is generally much faster than direct disk writes on Windows.
+
+</p></li><li>
+<p>Reading is about an order of magnitude faster than writing, for all
+systems and for both SQLite and direct-to-disk I/O.
+
+</p></li><li>
+<p>I/O performance varies widely depending on operating system and hardware.
+Make your own measurements before drawing conclusions.
+
+</p></li><li>
+<p>Some other SQL database engines advise developers to store blobs in separate
+files and then store the filename in the database. In that case, where
+the database must first be consulted to find the filename before opening
+and reading the file, simply storing the entire blob in the database
+gives much faster read and write performance with SQLite.
+See the <a href="intern-v-extern-blob.html">Internal Versus External BLOBs</a> article for more information.
+</p></li></ol>
+
+
+<h1 id="additional_notes"><span>4. </span>Additional Notes</h1>
+
+<a name="compile-android"></a>
+<h2 id="compiling_and_testing_on_android"><span>4.1. </span>Compiling And Testing on Android</h2>
+
+<p>
+The kvtest program is compiled and run on Android as follows.
+First install the Android SDK and NDK. Then prepare a script
+named "android-gcc" that looks approximately like this:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>#!/bin/sh
+#
+NDK=/home/drh/Android/Sdk/ndk-bundle
+SYSROOT=$NDK/platforms/android-16/arch-arm
+ABIN=$NDK/toolchains/arm-linux-androideabi-4.9/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin
+GCC=$ABIN/arm-linux-androideabi-gcc
+$GCC --sysroot=$SYSROOT -fPIC -pie $*
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>Make that script executable and put it on your $PATH. Then
+compile the kvtest program as follows:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>android-gcc -Os -I. kvtest.c sqlite3.c -o kvtest-android
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>Next, move the resulting kvtest-android executable to the Android
+device:
+
+</p><div class="codeblock"><pre>adb push kvtest-android /data/local/tmp
+</pre></div>
+
+<p>Finally use "adb shell" to get a shell prompt on the Android device,
+cd into the /data/local/tmp directory, and begin running the tests
+as with any other unix host.
+</p><p align="center"><small><i>This page last modified on <a href="https://sqlite.org/docsrc/honeypot" id="mtimelink" data-href="https://sqlite.org/docsrc/finfo/pages/fasterthanfs.in?m=0f7552234f">2023-12-05 14:43:20</a> UTC </small></i></p>
+