About 9 years ago I had a small site where both page content and some large PDF files were stored in the same SQLite database. Nothing extravagant: about 20 pages and 10 PDF files, each PDF file averaging 2-3 MBs. The website was extremely and consistently slow: it would take several seconds to load any page. I eventually figured out that the problem was the binary blobs. After moving the PDF files from the database to the filesystem the load times went below 0.1s.

Since then I have not put large binary blobs in a database but I wonder if I would get reasonable performance by putting them in a _separate_ database instead of mixing them with other small-size rows.