Simon Willison • 7/14/2026

lobste.rs is now running on SQLite

This article details the migration of the community site Lobste.rs from MariaDB to SQLite, a process planned since 2018. Initially targeting PostgreSQL, the team switched to SQLite last year and completed the migration in July 2026. The result is a single VPS running a Rails application with a 3.8GB primary SQLite database, plus cache, queue, and security databases. CPU and memory usage dropped, site performance improved, and hosting costs halved. The migration PR involved 735 additions and 593 deletions across 188 files. This serves as a case study for using SQLite in production web applications.

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#migration #sqlite #database