You can read more discussion here: https://github.com/sparklemotion/sqlite3-ruby/pull/528 and here: https://github.com/digital-fabric/extralite/pull/46 to see how it was validated that simply releases the GVL for every `step` in the SQLite VM majorly hurts single-threaded performance. Finding a middle ground for both single threaded and multi-threaded performance is tricky. In Rails, we know it is multi-threaded because of the connection pool. But the lower level gem is used in many other libraries and tools where it is used in a single threaded environment