Performance
How fast is it? Here are the measurements.
DB Studio Pro is built on Electron, not as a purely native Mac app. That is a trade-off, so here is what it costs and what it does not, with the numbers and how we got them.
- Open to a usable window
- 0.79 s
- median of five starts; the very first start after a restart took 2.02 s
- First rows of a 1,000,000-row table
- 0.12 s
- results load in pages, so memory rose only about 30 MB
- Memory in use, idle
- ~0.5 GB
- added up across the app’s processes; this is the cost of Electron
What that means
The app opens quickly and stays responsive on very large tables, because it asks the database for a page at a time instead of pulling everything into memory, and it streams exports straight to disk. A slow SQLite or Access query runs in its own process and can be cancelled.
The honest cost is memory. An Electron app carries a web engine, so it uses more memory than a purely native tool would. If you run on a small machine with many other heavy apps, keep that in mind. In exchange, one codebase lets us ship the same careful behaviour on every platform we support.
How we measured
- Machine: Apple M4 Pro, 24 GB, macOS 15.6.1.
- Measured 2026-10-19 with the built app and a SQLite file of 1,000,000 rows and six columns.
- Startup: the time from launching the app to a query tab being ready, five runs. Memory: resident memory of the app and every process it started, which counts shared memory more than once and so overstates slightly.
- Your numbers will differ with your hardware and databases. A query against a remote server is limited by the server and the network.
- We do not publish comparisons with other tools, because we have not measured them under the same conditions. Try the 14-day trial and judge on your own work.
The measuring script, scripts/benchmark.mjs, is part of our code, and we rerun it for releases.