For reading many blobs of approx 10KB each, it is often faster to read them out of an SQLite database than from separate files on disk. See https://sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html for details and to download code that you can use to test this yourself on your system.

I don't know if SQLite would be faster or slower in the context suggested here. But I'd like to suggest that perhaps it is worth running the experiment before reaching a conclusion.