Thanks, I'll take a look at mmap too: <https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_mmap_size> Interestingly the Python `sqlite3` library (which is written in C) releases the GIL when executing queries, which makes me hopeful that SQLite in Python can take advantage of multiple cores even within a single Python process. I haven't figured out a good way to confirm that this is happening yet though!