How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

from my own experience what notion did is pretty much required to use wasm sqlite with persistence in production. on the one hand being used at notions scale really points to wasm sqlite being ready for primetime, on the other hand there are still a LOT of ugly parts that need to be worked around:

- tooling, support and debugging for opfs

- only really works with a single worker using sync api, but this is not available from service workers

- the official js releases are really not idiomatic js and require in depth understanding to pick out the right parts and then build a usable layer on top, afaik there is no existing npm package that just provides what is required

Re: How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

#5

Post by nafey » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 2:58 PM UTC

I believe it's a missed opportunity not to bundle sqlite in major browsers. I understand that making SQLite part of the browser spec introduces all sorts of complications [1] down the line. But nevertheless, it would have proved to be quite a nifty tool.

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...

Re: How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

#6

Post by AlexErrant » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 3:02 PM UTC

> OPFS doesn’t come with graceful handling of concurrency out of the box. Developers should be aware of this and design around it.

There's a multiple readers and writers proposal [0]. It's been "position: positive" by Firefox [1], implemented in Chrome [2], and ignored by Webkit [3] (of course).

    0: https://github.com/whatwg/fs/blob/main/proposals/MultipleReadersWriters.md
    1: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/861
    2: https://chromestatus.com/feature/5172892632875008
    3: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/238

Love the shoutout to Roy Hashimoto. He's been writing VFSs for SQLite-on-the-browser and perf testing them. He's recently wrote "IDBMirrorVFS", which "is a new example VFS that keeps all SQLite files in memory while persisting to IndexedDB". It has remarkable performance, of course. https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/discussions/189

Also, looks like Roy takes advantage of the aforementioned proposal when he wrote `OPFSPermutedVFS`, which takes 2nd pace behind `IDBMirrorVFS` w/r/t perf. https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/blob/master/src/exam...

Re: How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

#7

Post by compressedgas » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 3:12 PM UTC

nafey wrote: post #5

I believe it's a missed opportunity not to bundle sqlite in major browsers. I understand that making SQLite part of the browser spec introduces all sorts of complications [1] down the line. But nevertheless, it would have proved to be quite a nifty tool. [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...

They already did that. It was called WebSQL. It was removed I think in favor of IndexedDB.

Re: How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

#8

Post by slightwinder » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 3:41 PM UTC

compressedgas wrote: post #7

nafey wrote: post #5

I believe it's a missed opportunity not to bundle sqlite in major browsers. I understand that making SQLite part of the browser spec introduces all sorts of complications [1] down the line. But nevertheless, it would have proved to be quite a nifty tool. [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...

They already did that. It was called WebSQL. It was removed I think in favor of IndexedDB.

[..] Web SQL Database was a prior API developed by Apple.[12] But Firefox refused to add support for it and argued against it becoming a standard because it would codify the quirks of SQLite.[13][14] It was thus deprecated in favor of IndexedDB.[..]

Mozilla again.. The real joke is, Firefox is now the only(?) browser using sqlite out-of-the-box for internal databases.

Re: How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

#9

Post by slightwinder » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

They have an actual sql-datebase on the client as cache, but still no offline-mode? Damn it. This must be their most demanded feature for years.

Re: How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

#10

Post by bearjaws » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

Overall I think using SQLite locally to offload database work is incredibly powerful. Given most laptops have an SSD now a days, you can scan an entire 30-100MiB SQLite db in miliseconds.

Meanwhile in AWS you would pay $27k a month to have the same IOPS as a Lenovo Thinkpad X1.

I just got done with a side project using WASM SQLite as well, it's incredibly powerful, even supports full text search.

My project "cluttr" is a local first site that focuses on cleaning up your screen shots folder and making it searchable via OCR. All in browser.

It also supports using Ollama to run a vision model against your images to provide more context.

Really helpful if you take a lot of screenshots for clients or PMs and need to find them later. The best part is 99% of the hosting cost is offloaded to the client, so I am not really worried about a large server bill.

https://cluttr.pages.dev/

(working on deployment to https://cluttr.ai later today)