On work, my area has a conflicting relationship with IT, thus we are often required to use unusual setups...
Well, we've tried distributing applications that needed to share a DB backend. We tried a MS Access backend first, but it stopped working after about 5 people were using it. Then we migrated to SQLite, it handled well up to near 50 people, then its over-restrictive locking become a problem. Luckly by that time we got hold of an Postgres server.
Low to medium traffic websites don't usualy have much more than 10 working threads, so yes, I've used a lousely similar setup, and it worked. It'll depend on how much time is spent on DB access vs. local processing, and how fast the DB is accessed by those servers, so YMMV.
It's worth noting that you can split your data among multiple database files (effectively on-disk sharding) to alleviate contention... in-memory record caching and mostly read scenarios will also reduce contention.
There's a LOT you can do with SQLite... not to mention that with simple read caching and reduced writes you can get a lot of performance out of SQLite. Highly interactive web applications, I wouldn't expect to handle more than 50 users on a single system backed by SQLite, as you mention... with SSD, you may get a couple more.
Yes, we start splitting the data at one point. But don't take those 50 users limit too seriously, it was more a consequence of bad networking infrastructure than of SQLite.
I have no idea how far SQLite would go on a nice network with a sane file sharing protocol.
If you aren't having to do many writes, it will fly for thousands of users... when you have to do a lot of writes, then it will slow to a crawl. I've seen distributed Access based database apps that handled several hundred simultaneous users before.
Well, we've tried distributing applications that needed to share a DB backend. We tried a MS Access backend first, but it stopped working after about 5 people were using it. Then we migrated to SQLite, it handled well up to near 50 people, then its over-restrictive locking become a problem. Luckly by that time we got hold of an Postgres server.
Low to medium traffic websites don't usualy have much more than 10 working threads, so yes, I've used a lousely similar setup, and it worked. It'll depend on how much time is spent on DB access vs. local processing, and how fast the DB is accessed by those servers, so YMMV.