I think (respectfully) the LLM that probably wrote this overshot the mark here because busy-polling a select does not actually sound better to me than a "kernel file watcher".
This reminds me of the teenager who told her dad that she was just a tiny little bit pregnant.
It does seem weird though even for sqlite. I wonder how oban does it. I also wonder if OP knows oban can run on sqlite.
And if you are making changes, don't you have to poll regardless after the file watcher wakes you?
For WAL mode, SQLite can probably satisfy this query just by inspecting some shared memory. But it is busy waiting, sure.
k3s has been running on my home server for about three years now (using the default SQLite backend), and there doesn't seem to be excessive CPU usage despite dozens of watches existing in the simulated etcd. Of course, this doesn't say much about Honker, but it's nonetheless worth pointing out that sometimes the choice of database forces one towards a certain design.
[1] https://github.com/k3s-io/kine/blob/648a2daa/pkg/logstructur...
I had a manual fs polling thing a while back. It was ugly (low time budget, didn't wanna mess with the native watchers), just scanned the whole thing once per second. It averaged out to like 0.3% CPU.
Not elegant, but acceptable for my purposes! (Small-ish directory, and "ping me within a second or two" was realtime enough for this use case.)
> How it works: honker polls SQLite’s PRAGMA data_version every millisecond. That’s a monotonic counter SQLite increments on every commit from any connection, journal mode, or process — a ~3 µs read for a precise wake signal.
To make it look even more absurd . SQLite is not concurrent and you’ll have tons of problems using it practically .
I’d like to see messages per second.