[mangecoeur]

Sqlite is a great bit of technology but sometimes I read articles like this and think, maybe they should have used postgres. I you don’t specifically need the “one file portability” aspect of sqlite, or its not embedded (in which case you shouldn’t have concurrency issues), Postgres is easy to get running and solves these problems.

[abound]

Jellyfin is a self-hostable media server. If they "used Postgres", that means anyone who runs it needs Postgres. I think SQLite is the better choice for this kind of application, if one is going to choose a single database instead of some pluggable layer

[tombert]

I share my Jellyfin with about a dozen people, and it's not weird to have several people streaming at the same time. I have a two gigabit connection so bandwidth isn't generally an issue, but I've had issues when three people all streaming a VC-1 encoded video to H264 in software.

This is something that I think I could fairly easily ameliorate if I could simply load-balance the application server by user, but historically (with Emby), I've not been able to do that due to SQLite locking not allowing me to run multiple instances pointing to the same config instance.

There's almost certainly ways to do this correctly with SQLite but if they allowed for using almost literally any other database this would be a total non-issue.

ETA:

For clarification if anyone is reading this, all this media LEGALLY OBTAINED with PERMISSION FROM THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S).

[reddalo]

They're actually planning on migrating to Postgres in a future release:

>[...] it also opens up new possibilities - not officially yet, but soon - for running Jellyfin backed by "real" database systems like PostgreSQL, providing new options for redundancy, load-balancing, and easier maintenance and administration. The future looks very bright!

https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-release-10.11.0/

[npodbielski]

What is the problem to bundle postgress db engine in the docker server? If you want to install it from package, they can have postgress dB as an option with the warning somewhere that it is 'recomended'. I am sure that if you are able to slefhost stuff you are able to install postgress too.

[morshu9001]

Exactly, there are use cases where SQLite makes sense but you also want to make it faster. I really don't get why there isn't a more portable Postgres.

[petters]

Jellyfin is mostly for a single household, right? Sqlite should be much more than sufficient for Jellyfin (if used correctly). Unfortunately, reading this article you get the impression that they are not using it optimally

[nick_]

Agreed. How can a media file sharing app possibly saturate Sqlite's write limit? I would use an app-level global lock on all writes to Sqlite.

[thayne]

Using postgres would make it significantly more complicated for Jellyfin users to install and set up Jellyfin. And then users would need to worry about migrating the databases when PostgreSQL has a major version upgrade. An embedded database like sqlite is a much better fit for something like Jellyfin.

[throwaway894345]

As a Jellyfin user, this hasn’t been my experience. I needed to do a fair bit of work to make sure Jellyfin could access its database no matter which node it was scheduled onto and that no more than one instance ever accessed the database at the same time. Jellyfin by far required more work to setup maintainably than any of the other applications I run, and it is also easily the least reliable application. This isn’t all down to SQLite, but it’s all down to a similar set of assumptions (exactly one application instance interacting with state over a filesystem interface).

[amaccuish]

Their whole recent rewrite of the DB code (to Entity Framework) is to allow the user choice of DB in future.

[o11c]

Even with postgres, you don't have to use the system instance; there's nothing stopping you from running the server as a child process.

You probably need to support this for your testsuite anyway.

[hamandcheese]

Maybe in theory. In practice, most people who need Postgres for their test suite will boot an instance in a docker container in CI, and maybe just assume a system version is available for local dev.

[heavyset_go]

I run Jellyfin in a multi-arch cluster because I hate myself, and this would force me to think about where Jellyfin/Postgres is deployed because Postgres databases aren't portable.

I already had to do that for my authoritative PG deployment, and my media manager shouldn't require a full RDBMS.

Using SQLite for Jellyfin has made running it wherever really, really easy, same thing with doing backups and lazy black box debugging.

[andersmurphy]

Sqlite is fine you need to read the extensive documentation though to get the most out of it. It also has terrible defaults.

I think the author od this article missed sqlite_busy.

Once you do have it set up correctly, are handling a single writer at the application level and have litestream set up your off to the races assuming your app can scale on a single box (it most likely can).

[zeroq]

Sqlite has so many small benefits for tiny projects it can't be easily replaced.

It's like saying "oh, you want to visit Austrian country side next month and you're asking for advice for best tent? How about you build a cabin instead?".

[bambax]

Jellyfin is a media server app that gets installed on a great variety of platforms and while it would certainly be possible to add a postgres server to the install, the choice of sqlite is more than justified here IMHO.

[throwaway894345]

As a user of Jellyfin, I’m very sad that it doesn’t just use Postgres. I basically have to run an NFS system just for Jellyfin so that its data can be available to it no matter which node it gets scheduled on and also that there are never multiple instances running at the same time, even during deployments (e.g., I need to take care that deployments completely stop the first Jellyfin instance before starting the subsequent instance). There are so many unnecessary single points of failure, and Postgres would make a pretty big one go away (never mind addressing the parallelism problems that plague the developers).

Jellyfin is by far the least reliable application I run, but it also seems to be best in class.

[apitman]

You're from the current generation of selfhosters, which culturally is very similar to kit car builders. The next generation of selfhosters/indiehosters just want a car to get from point A to point B. Sqlite is better for those people.

[KingMob]

I gave up on Jellyfin after media library updates kept hanging on certain video files, and switched to the original Emby it was forked from (iiuc).

Emby has a scarily-ancient install process, but it's been working just fine with less hassle.

[ants_everywhere]

I have the same experience. SQLite has been a source of most Jellyfin problems, and Jellyfin has more problems than the rest of the ~ 150 containers I run regularly.

A stateless design where a stateless jellyfin server talks to a postgres database would be simpler and more robust.

[eduction]

100%. I specifically clicked for the “why you should care” and was disappointed I could not find it.

I certainly don’t mind if someone is pushing the limits of what SQLite is designed for but personally I’d just rather invest the (rather small) overhead of setting up a db server if I need a lot of concurrency.