Comment 30 for bug 292739

Okay, I finally used my head for a while, and found a work-around for this problem. In short,
cat ~/evolution/mai/imap/*/folders.db > /dev/null
before starting evolution seems to make it load at least as fast as the versions before sqlite.

Now, this seems to be an issue either with the block device scheduler, sqlite or both. It's visible that when you have two tasks that do a lot of disk IO (firefox tends to do that when first reading the location bar cache, or updatedb, or dpkg), then the whole system grinds down to a halt. Evolution does the same just by itself, by doing a lot of small reads on two files in parallel and most drives don't really like that.
(I might try testing this on a RAID1 array of faster drives, if that could be useful)

For the record, I'm using standard intrepid + proposed.