Of course it takes longer if you specify the rowid. When the rowid is automatically generated it is simply the one greater than the last one present, which is obtained simply by going to the tail of the b-tree (following all the right-hand pointers to the end of the line) and adding one. If you specify the rowid, then your provided rowid must be looked up in a separate seek operation to decide what to do (succeed or have an abortion). An extra lookup in the sqlite_sequence table is only required if you used the AUTOINCREMENT keyword, which will make the process even longer.