Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file • Hacker News Board

Post by mdnahas » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 1:55 AM UTC

davidron wrote: post #171

leo_e wrote: post #147

The "SQLite doesn't scale" argument is usually just premature optimization masquerading as architectural wisdom. Unless you are actively hitting WAL contention limits (which is surprisingly hard to do on modern NVMe), the operational simplicity of a single binary beats the "scalability" of a distributed mess any day. We’ve normalized a complexity tax where every side project "needs" a dedicated DB cluster and a Redis…

The bottleneck of most applications is acquiring enough users to hit a technical bottleneck.

I’ve used PocketBase in production. We ran into DB issues because the admin page loaded all orders and that climbed over 5000. I didn’t think that was much for a read-only operation, but when 5 staff were loading it every 30 seconds, it occasionally got very slow: 10 to 30 second load times.

Faster Vultr server didn’t help. The recommendation was to redesign the admin page to do search on the server rather than in the client. But that wasn’t possible at the time.

I enjoyed writing on top of PocketBase and running it. The developer was very helpful - quick, useful responses. My brother did his wedding website with it. It’s great for small projects. For higher performance ones, you will need to test and shift your design.