Even starting to edit a project is now painful with an old machine because loading the footprint data takes so long. About half a minute. Indeed an sqlite data cache would be useful.
KiCad footprint loading is very sensitive to disk fragmentation. Even though the files themselves may not be fragmented, the .pretty directories contents can get scattered all over the disk
I have a ssd disk here. Fragementation shouldn’t be a problem. 3D models are in an old hd, but it shouldn’t be a problem for the library tree loading?
Antivirus could be responsible, another side effect of per file objects
I don’t have one 
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It could also be about too little memory (4Gig). I tested by starting KiCad again and now loading the fp libraries took only < 10 sec. Maybe I notice it only when it’s slower. I usually switch between projects, close and open KiCad and the first time library loading can be very painful for each KiCad instance.
Slow library loading is a problem mostly on Windows platforms as loading of lots of small files is not really fast due to OS issues. Nonetheless the process is cached but in V5 cache is part of the project even for global libraries. So when creating a new project a new cache has to be created. I think that for V6 this has been corrected so that cache for global libraries is shared between projects.
I am sure that for symbol libraries same system will be implemented.
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