[groue]

What's cool with WAL mode is that SQLITE_BUSY won't happen for readers (except very rare scenarios: https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html#sometimes_queries_return_sql...)

One should only expect SQLITE_BUSY for writes (if a writer is already holding the lock, and the busy timeout expires before the other writer releases the lock). So yes, prefer short writes, or adjust your timeout. Generally speaking, SQLITE_BUSY can not be 100% prevented for writes.

[stavros]

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. For most apps, it's fairly easy to keep writes short, so SQLite is a great fit.

[groue]

Yes. Now, many short writes look exactly as one very long write from the point of view of an enqueued write that is waiting for its turn :-) I don't quite remember how fair is SQLite scheduling, in practice.

[avdempsey]

I don’t think there is any scheduling. Each connection polls to see if the write lock is available up to the max busy timeout setting.

The connection polls at these intervals: static const u8 delays[] = { 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 25, 25, 50, 50, 100 };

So, if you are using the default 5 second timeout, and you are trying to acquire a lock while an exclusive lock is held, you will wait 1 second, then 2 seconds, then 5 seconds, and timeout. I’m not sure if you timeout after 3 total seconds have elapsed, or sometimes after the 2 and sometimes after the 5.

If you have a thread running many fast queries in a loop you can deny access to another thread that needs a lock. The other thread may get lucky and poll for the lock at the exact moment in between locks from the other thread, but it might not.

[stavros]

Hm, right. At that point, I guess it's time to increase throughput, but it's a fair observation.