Programmer wanting to improve Songbird performance - ideas?

Hi! I'm a programmer, sysadmin, and power user. And I am trying to switch to Songbird as my main music player. I love it so far, so kudos for that. Now, on to my problems...

I have a large library (~50k songs) and I'm looking for ways to improve performance. Songbird basically hangs after every operation I perform. Everything causes it to stall -- updating the artist on a song's metadata, doing a search, even advancing to the next track. The exorcist addons take about 1 hour per 1k songs it removes from my library (I had ~3k dead tracks out of 50k!), and while doing so, the UI is completely unresponsive. Browsing my library is terrible, too!

So -- what can I do? When I spy on the Win32 API calls, I see that most of Songbird's time is spent doing I/O. When I'm running the Exorcist addon, 90% of that I/O is aimed at the SQLite database of my library. When I'm just skipping around the interface, it's pretty clear that Songbird is attempting to "Watch Folders" *a lot*.

I'd like to teach Songbird about doing bigger chunks of I/O at once, or convince it to use more RAM, or something! I'd even consider teaching it how to not do full table scans (or what look like full table scans. anyway) of the SQLite databases. Or cacheing somewhere! Are there preferences for this? Help!