That is what I am trying to do.

Can you provide an example of how that could be done (in-memory filesystem)? I tried to pass it a filehandle (which didn't work), then I looked at the code and that sqlite_backup_to_file is part of the sqlite c api. It takes a filename as an argument, opens it, writes to it, and closes it.

True enough about benchmarks :) but I do know that file operations are slower than in-memory ones.