How would you know it's faster? WAL is about concurrency, not speed. How could it be faster, for a single connection? Has to potentially re-assemble a table (or index) pages across the DB and WAL files, while in the RBJ mode, it's only in the DB file. Maybe it is marginally faster but really WAL mode makes sense to avoid locking across connections. With many concurrent connections, WAL is likely to pay off, but otherwise I suspect not. But I'd be happy to be wrong of course.