While playing with the SQLite vs Filesystem benchmark, I became intrigued by how the cache between the two approaches behaved. That led me to discover a super exciting tool called vmtouch, which allows you to interact with the Operating System page cache and do some performance debugging.

This is a journey of how I, a developer unfamiliar with C, went down the rabbit hole of navigating the SQLite source and changed it to offer a capability that wasn’t available.

One of the main problems a database storage engine has to solve is how to deal with data in disk that is bigger than the available memory. A way databases solve this issue is through memory-mapped files and a system call called mmap. Discover what mmap is and how you can make use of it in Go.