LobstersTuesday · July 14, 2026FREE

lobste.rs is now running on SQLite

Lobste.rs, a social news aggregation site, completed its migration from MariaDB to SQLite in production on July 11, 2026, after a process that began with issue #539 in 2019. The migration was led by user thomas0, who initially suggested MySQL as an alternative but later took on the SQLite migration in June 2025. The first deployment attempt on February 21 failed due to CPU spikes to 100% under read-only traffic, caused by SQLite performing full table scans on the largest tables and an N+1 query issue. These were fixed in a third pull request, which also added a slow query log. The second deployment on July 11 succeeded, with the site remaining live and resource usage stable. Post-deployment, minor issues were promptly fixed. The migration resulted in lower CPU and memory usage, a snappier site experience, and halved VPS costs once the MariaDB server was taken down. The site handled the Monday traffic spike without issues. The SQLite gem's support for user-defined functions was used to implement missing functions.