Since I was installing postgres for another purpose on my webserver, I decided to quickly see if Publ performs better on Postgres vs SQLite. To test the performance I compared the timing for my website on both doing a full site reindex, and rendering the Atom feed several times (using the debug Flask server and caching disabled).

Times are in seconds:

So, SQLite is, as I had assumed, substantially faster than Postgres, and also has much lower administrative overhead. Thus, I will continue to recommend that as the database of choice for traditionally-hosted deployments.

My belief is that, in general, if you’re building something where there’s only a single process connecting to the database (i.e. you don’t have a cluster talking to a single database instance), SQLite will perform better than Postgres. The reason to use Postgres is so that you can scale to multiple processes or servers talking to a single centralized data store. If you can build your system such that each database connection can be isolated to a single database instance, SQLite is going to perform much better.

There are other considerations, of course, but if performance is your primary concern, SQLite isn’t a bad way to go.

However, the site repository is still configured to work with Heroku (as well as being self-hosted), and you can still access the Heroku instance at publ.herokuapp.com to see it in action. They should, for the most part, mirror one another.

Anyway, there will probably be some kinks to iron out in the meantime. But on the plus side, it means this site will finally be accessible via https!