[benbjohnson]

Litestream flushes out changes to S3 on an interval. By default, it’s every 10 seconds although you could reasonably drop that down to 1 second. You could go lower if you’re replicating to NFS.

That interval determines your window for data loss in the event of a catastrophic failure (e.g. disk failure). I’ve run multiple DigitalOcean machines for years and have never had a catastrophic failure so they are rare events but they can happen.

Dqlite and rqlite run every write through a distributed consensus algorithm which guarantees that your writes are persisted across at least a majority of nodes in your cluster before returning a success. In that situation, you’d need a catastrophic failure on a majority of nodes to lose data, however, there is generally a large performance trade off when running distributed consensus.