Hacker News Reader

SQLITE cannot handle indexing queries of our kind and is not used. We have kept the page slim, so as the website is as fast as possible.

If you don't mind me asking, what technologies are you using?

It appears to be using Caddy at least https://caddyserver.com/

Caddy is just used as a reverse proxy, a frontend for the backends.

You could use Sqlite for persistence, but a search index like Lucene for full-text searching - and Lucene runs great in constrained environments too.

Sphinx Search is orders of magnitude faster and more lightweight than Lucene.

Heck, even PostgreSQL's fulltext indexes would be faster than those Java monsters.