That's true, but it also means that random access will always use at least that amount of data even if it only has to fetch a tiny amount. I did a few (non-scientific) benchmarks on a few queries and 1kB seemed like an OK compromise.

And note that the request chunk size is bound to the SQLite page size, and to change that page size you have to rewrite the whole DB. So it can't be set on the fly unless you have multiple copies of the database.